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How Billion Dollar Marketplaces Are Built
- russiansanders 7y agoA marketplace startup is a tough business, because you not only have attract buyers and sellers, you need to police scammers. Even Ebay/Amazon doesn't have a handle on this completely and they ARE billion dollar marketplaces.
- echelon 7y agoI'm not sure why your comment was flagged / dead. It seems pertinent and on point.
- russiansanders 7y agoI'm not sure why it's been flagged either. For me, it shows it's been upvoted. Very strange behavior on HN.
- echelon 7y agoYou're being targeted. This comment was dead too. :(
- j45 7y agoSad thAt this kind of immature behaviour is on HN. Mods should be easily able to search for this kind of behaviour
- j45 7y agoHow nice to be downvoted for this comment.
- dredmorbius 7y ago"Dead" indicates an account-level filter, not flags applied to a specific comment. Often this is based on prior history, based on exchanges with admins. It's possible for accounts/users to be rehabilitated. "Vouch" actions or emailing mods can have effects.
- Scoundreller 7y agoJust a new user thing probably. It’s been resurrected.
- echelon 7y agoI had to click "vouch", because the comment was dead :/
- grzm 7y agoSometimes new accounts get (mistakenly) caught in anti-abuse filters. If it was [dead], that’s likely what happened. If it was [flagged][dead], it was the result of user action. In those cases, vouch as you did. You can also email the mods using the Contact link in the footer to make them aware so they can take a look at what’s going on.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- j45 7y agoNothing big or complicated is easy
- nrp 7y agoIt would be interesting to see examples of the alternatives. That is, marketplaces that failed due to scammers, marketplaces that succeeded by heavily curating to block scammers, and marketplaces that failed due to excessive curation while trying to stop scammers. I wonder if scamming is actually a symptom of a successful marketplace. Scammers presumably have to think through their opportunity costs and would want to focus on marketplaces with many buyers and sellers and high transaction volume.
- everdev 7y ago> I wonder if scamming is actually a symptom of a successful marketplace. For new marketplaces the risk and reward are pretty low. For mature marketplaces the reward is much higher and the risks probably vary based on your home country. The ideal for a scammer is probably a site with good enough security to remove most scammers but not good enough to remove you.
- arsenico 7y ago> marketplaces that succeeded by heavily curating to block scammers Think about Uber as a marketplace which heavily curates scammers, success is a matter of many discussions though.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoStep 1: Borrow 2 Billion Dollars.
- coder1001 7y agoCan you say online communities (e.g. Reddit) are like marketplaces?
- monkeydust 7y agoWould say no as their is no economic transfer on Reddit... Yet anyway.
- coder1001 7y agoI should have added, similar in what it takes to get them started?
- Scoundreller 7y agoBut they sure do drive a lot of economic transfer one way or another. You can post all of your retirement investments there and actually get pretty good advice in a lot of parts. That’s bad for a lot of « no-fee » financial planners. Just for example.
- stanislavb 7y agoI've been told that it isn't a marketplace unless there's a financial transaction facilitated by it. However, I don't agree.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAfter a fashion. The "buying" party would be the readers, and the "selling" party would be... the rest of the Internet. The twist here is that some of the "sellers" don't know their content is being posted. But many do, which makes clickbait and marketing in general an example of the scammer problem that afflicts regular marketplaces.
- crazygringo 7y agoA marketplace by definition has to be a "market", e.g. have some form of prices and supply/demand. The currency doesn't have to be dollars -- it can be an imaginary videogame currency, for example -- but there has to be one. So no, Reddit isn't a marketplace, any more than a library or editorial magazine or "letters to the editor" are marketplaces (which they aren't). Upvotes aren't currency -- you can't buy and sell them.
- stanislavb 7y agoI'm positioning SaaSHub as a "software marketplace"; however, I've been told it isn't a marketplace if there aren't financial transactions happening through it. What do you think, could there be a marketplace without facilitating direct fin transactions?
- adventured 7y agoI think you make me ponder what's a reasonable limit to forcing commercial spam into threads for self-promotion purposes.
- bananocurrency 7y agoI cannot click on a single thread without it being mentioned at this point.
- pirouline99999 7y agoI've seen your site and I think it's more of an aggregator or even a hub. It could be a marketplace but instead all of the $ is escaping to the vendor sites. It's akin to the difference between amazon and google shopping in my mind. (admittedly google shopping probably gets a referral fee or something but maybe you do to?)
- algo_trader 7y agoHas anyone interacted with NFX and Gigi Levy-Weiss? Especially with respect to seed/pre-A investing? I have seen plenty of NFX ads on reddit and twitter, but I guess it just a PR push. We are B2C, web-based, with some starting revenue, growing. But with out any "stars/reputation" on the team. So that's our main weakness.
- retnuhllort 7y agoI cold emailed them once, hoping to pitch a business matching what I beloved their thesis was. That didn't go anywhere and I never got to properly pitch to them. We had minimal traction, no pedigree or track record of success.
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoI'm increasingly convinced that building a marketplace or a social network is the wrong way to think about it. Rather it should be conceptualized as moving or consolidating an existing market or network. The best ones actually lower the friction for socially beneficial outcomes.
- josephjrobison 7y agoA good example of this that comes to mind on a very small scale is a marketing slack community (TTT) that essentially took a loose network that already existed and gave them a home.
- nickjj 7y agoCan'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're somewhat established? This is what it seems like for just about every marketplace. Marketplaces seem like one of the most corrupt / shady / backstabby lines of businesses I've ever been a part of. This is coming at it from a content creator on some video course platforms in the past.
- cody3222 7y agoCan you give some examples? I feel like that's not the case: eBay, AirBnB, etc are some of the iconic marketplaces and create massive income opportunities to people who didn't this option before the platform existed.
- redis_mlc 7y ago> eBay, AirBnB, etc are some of the iconic marketplaces I know several eBay merchants. They all gripe at the high fees, ever-changing UI and rules, etc. Recently ebay bucks was reduced from 2% to 1%, and now sales tax is collected across all purchases. > create massive income opportunities Are you a shill, or do you believe all the PR?
- markdown 7y agoTripAdvisor. I deal with small business (owner-operator) resorts every day and what they all seem to have in common is a hatred for TripAdvisor.
- dinisp 7y agoFabrice Grinda has some interesting content on YouTube and his website regarding marketplace/platforms. Does anyone know of any Shopify equivalent marketplace model that would enable one to build a niche version of Thumbtack?