Matt Collins

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Marketplaces

Marketplace businesses are fascinating because they can be incredibly hard to get going, but extremely valuable if they’re successful.

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Entrepreneurship

15 Marketplace Startups That Have Raised Over $50 Million

One of the interesting things about online marketplaces is their inherent network effects. They’re hard to get going (not least because of the chicken-and-egg problem) but — if successful — can become very valuable as it’s hard for other businesses to compete. As a result of this defensibility, online marketplaces Read more…

By Matt Collins, 5 yearsDecember 19, 2017 ago
chicken
Marketplaces

How to Use Scarcity to Hack the Marketplace Chicken-and-Egg Problem

Solving the chicken-and-egg problem is a key one for any marketplace business. Here’s one hack that uses scarcity to help with solving it. What is the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem? When you’re starting a marketplace, you typically have no customers and no suppliers. With no customers, it’s hard to get suppliers Read more…

By Matt Collins, 5 yearsDecember 18, 2017 ago
Entrepreneurship

How Hired.com Started a Fast-Growing Careers Marketplace

If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and has raised Read more…

By Matt Collins, 7 yearsApril 20, 2016 ago
Hands in a swirling pattern
Entrepreneurship

7 Frameworks For Predicting Online Marketplace Success

What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental differences between the industries they chose to play in or Read more…

By Matt Collins, 8 yearsAugust 28, 2015 ago
Entrepreneurship

How Thumbtack Built a Huge Local Services Marketplace

How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs. So how did Thumbtack get where they are? What tactics are behind Read more…

By Matt Collins, 9 yearsAugust 21, 2014 ago
Entrepreneurship

Skillshare: How to Build a Marketplace for Online Education

I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll Read more…

By Matt Collins, 10 yearsMarch 2, 2013 ago
Entrepreneurship

Getting to Critical Mass: 8 Ways to Kickstart a Marketplace Business

Are you thinking of setting up a two-sided marketplace business? It’s a hard thing to do, so you’re going to need all the help you can get. Why not learn from how other people have managed it successfully in the past? One challenge of creating this kind of marketplace is that Read more…

By Matt Collins, 12 yearsDecember 8, 2010 ago

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