Resource Hub:
Building a Marketplace

Sharetribe

March 15, 2023

Juho Makkonen

Most marketplaces will eventually need custom software development to reach their goals. Figure out if it's time for your to find a marketplace developer and, if yes, how to find the right one.

Lenny's Newsletter

June 22, 2022

Lenny Rachitsky

Q: I’m building a marketplace startup. How do I build trust for my new marketplace? Convincing people to get into the car of, send money to, or meet, a complete stranger is a hard problem, rooted in our evolution. “Throughout human history, we have distrusted...

Lenny's Newsletter

March 29, 2022

Lenny Rachitsky

Q: I’m building a marketplace and am wondering, what KPIs should I focus on and track? As you probably know, marketplaces hold a special place in my heart. I spent many years optimizing both sides of the Airbnb marketplace, and later spent hundreds of hours...

Lenny's Newsletter

January 18, 2022

Deb Liu

I recently learned that Facebook Marketplace is the world’s second-largest marketplace, in terms of monthly active users, behind only Amazon. It’s ahead of Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, Taobao, and has quietly left the once...

Lenny's Newsletter

July 13, 2021

Lenny Rachitsky

Q: I’m building a labor marketplace (kind of like Thumbtack or Hired) and I’m wondering—how do labor marketplaces generally find their supply?I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about marketplaces, but I’ve never dug deeply into labor marketplaces specifically.

Medium

April 1, 2021

Jeff Fluhr

We started StubHub less than five years after eBay invented the low-touch marketplace but we diverged from eBay in that we chose a higher-touch model...

a16z

February 21, 2020

Jeff Jordan, Li Jin, D'Arcy Coolican, and Andrew Chen

Every company tracks certain success metrics—commonly accepted criteria for the health of a business. But when it comes to marketplaces, those measurements can often be imprecisely defined or muddled in their interpretation. Of...

a16z

February 20, 2020

D'Arcy Coolican

When building a marketplace, most companies strive to excel on all fronts: high frequency, high retention, and (relatively) high transaction values. Like a hybrid between Amazon and Airbnb, they want to build the kind of habit-forming...

a16z

August 28, 2019

Li Jin

There might be no more beloved image of the American entrepreneurial spirit than that of neighborhood kids who open a sidewalk lemonade stand on a hot summer day. With a little bit of “capital” from their parents — lemons, water...

Sharetribe

September 18, 2018

Mira Muurinen

Stasher co-founder and CCO Anthony Collias reveals how Stasher validated their business idea, built their tech, found partners and funders, and expanded the marketplace to three continents.