Building a marketplace - love or hate

Just starting to build one at the moment - not looking forward to the experience!

chicken and egg problem 🤯😈

Holy cow! It seems you gotta a lot of work!

I'm building one for Unblokd, the product I'm building. Just released it in beta. What's particularly difficult is that you have to tackle both ends at the same time. In my case, one end is developers learning something new. The other end is developers who can teach that or offer help. But that gives me a pretty rough idea of my target audience - developers. So I try to market it in places where developers hang out. I differentiate the message depending on where I'm posting. If I'm posting in a place where developers learn, I focus on the learning side. In a community of seasoned developers, I focus on helping others.

Hi Lisa! I've been in a couple of important marketplaces as CMO. In my case: hate it. A) You have to market for both, supply and demand. B) Weak value provided, easy to replicate C) Dealing with customer service of a service that you don't provide D) Eventually supply will steal your users E) Eventually Google will do it in SERP (Shopping, Flights, Recipes, Hotels....) F) Business model is a problem, you end up charging the customer too Anf finally, the CAC is huge, as you need to end up doing out of home or TV, like Trivago and generating loyalty is almost impossible.