The Concept That Explains Everything About Marketplaces

Understanding transaction costs will help you understand where marketplaces will succeed, what kind of marketplace to build, and how to price them.

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Brand = Accumulated Customer Happiness

How brand actually works for startups and why all marketing should be performance marketing.

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The New Problems Every Marketplace Faces After Product Market Fit

The advice marketplaces receive when solving the cold start problem rapidly becomes dangerous as the business heats up.

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The Unbundling Fallacy

When capital flows like water, many ideas seem like great standalone businesses. A 13-year bull run led to predictions of the unbundling of Craigslist, Facebook, Ebay, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many others that largely has not played out. This post explains why, and how to predict which ones will succeed.

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The future of marketplaces: coordination, capital, and creativity

Airbnb and Doordash ripped to a collective market cap well over $100B. They're also two more data points in a long trend toward marketplaces with higher commissions and that do more work to earn those commissions. This post explores what this means for the future of marketplaces and why in many cases the marketplace model will go extinct altogether.

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