You become what you measure. From my experience working with clients across enterprises and startups, the most common reason for failure and inefficiency is the focus on convenient, but inappropriate, metrics. Your technology doesn’t determine the business you build. Neither does your organizational capability. The metric you optimize for is the single biggest factor that determines which...
Marketplaces are difficult businesses to get off the ground. A marketplace without buyers cannot attract sellers and vice versa. In fact, the infamy of this proverbial chicken and egg problem detracts entrepreneurs from the challenges that a marketplace presents after it has successfully gained adoption and is successfully matching buyers with sellers. After all, marketplaces for products, like...
“There’s an empty slide in your deck reading user acquisition, which follows the slide showing hockey stick adoption. We’ll grow virally! Three words that fill up the slide nicely. Relying on virality as a standalone source of user acquisition is fatally flawed to begin with.” That’s Sangeet Paul Choudary at his usual best. He probably said that a hundred times over, yet Startups...
Marketplaces are difficult businesses to run. Like all multi-sided platform businesses, they suffer from the classic chicken and egg problem: the technology has no value unless buyers and sellers are present and you can’t get the buyers on board unless you have sellers and you can’t bring in sellers without having buyers. Hence, building a marketplace is a lot like building two separate companies...
