How Billion Dollar Marketplaces Are Built

A marketplace startup is a tough business, because you not only have attract buyers and sellers, you need to police scammers.<p>Even Ebay&#x2F;Amazon doesn&#x27;t have a handle on this completely and they ARE billion dollar marketplaces.

Can&#x27;t this be summed up with making it super attractive for sellers (or the content creators) early on, grow really fast and then completely screw your content creators after you&#x27;re somewhat established?<p>This is what it seems like for just about every marketplace. Marketplaces seem like one of the most corrupt &#x2F; shady &#x2F; backstabby lines of businesses I&#x27;ve ever been a part of. This is coming at it from a content creator on some video course platforms in the past.

I&#x27;m increasingly convinced that building a marketplace or a social network is the wrong way to think about it.<p>Rather it should be conceptualized as moving or consolidating an existing market or network.<p>The best ones actually lower the friction for socially beneficial outcomes.

Has anyone interacted with NFX and Gigi Levy-Weiss? Especially with respect to seed&#x2F;pre-A investing?<p>I have seen plenty of NFX ads on reddit and twitter, but I guess it just a PR push.<p>We are B2C, web-based, with some starting revenue, growing. But with out any &quot;stars&#x2F;reputation&quot; on the team. So that&#x27;s our main weakness.

Fabrice Grinda has some interesting content on YouTube and his website regarding marketplace&#x2F;platforms. Does anyone know of any Shopify equivalent marketplace model that would enable one to build a niche version of Thumbtack?

I&#x27;m positioning SaaSHub as a &quot;software marketplace&quot;; however, I&#x27;ve been told it isn&#x27;t a marketplace if there aren&#x27;t financial transactions happening through it.<p>What do you think, could there be a marketplace without facilitating direct fin transactions?

Can you say online communities (e.g. Reddit) are like marketplaces?