4 ms·
There are a lot of similarities to Craigslist. The lesson here is that while marketplaces are very hard to start, they are also very hard to kill.
by pg 15y ago
There are a lot of similarities to Craigslist. The lesson here is that while marketplaces are very hard to start, they are also very hard to kill.
- sjtgraham 15y agoWhat is your position on investing in marketplace startups, i.e. all other things being equal is a YC application describing a marketplace idea disadvantaged in anyway or scrutinised any harder than an idea not predicated on marketplace economics or the network effect?
- ig1 15y agoA while back I went through and analyzed all the marketplace startups that YC had invested in, and from a mixture of gut experience and the data it seems like YC is less likely to accept marketplace startups than non-marketplace startups (i.e. first time founders disproportionately found marketplace startups but this isn't shown in the YC cohorts). The ones that YC have accepted have generally seemed to been where they've really liked the team (i.e. AirBnB) as opposed to the idea. This is actually somewhat different to most funds who invest in marketplace startups, generally for most investors there's only one thing that makes a marketplace startup worth investing in and that's traction (because in most cases the technology itself is trivial).
- pmjordan 15y agoThe application form http://news.ycombinator.com/s2012form http://news.ycombinator.com/s2012form specifically addresses marketplace ideas in this question: How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that? From that I suspect the barriers to YC entry with a marketplace startup are somewhat higher.
- pg 15y agoIf we love them if the founders have a plan to beat the chicken and egg problem, and not if they don't.