Cohortplus Meetup: How to build online marketplace business product?
On 24th June 2018, I attended the meetup by Cohortplus.
Meetup Topic: How to build online marketplace business product?
Meetup Venue: Zeta HQ, Bengaluru, India
Speakers:
- Kshitij Bhotika — Head of Products, Practo
- Ankit Jain — VP, Products, Practo
Key Takeaways from the Session:
- Chicken and Egg Situation: This came up quite a lot of times in the session. For a marketplace to be successful you require buyers and suppliers. There is an inherent need to balance this well. There is no formula or well tested method one can use to build but mostly it is advisable to work on the supply side first. Try to entice the suppliers with some product that solves their problem. Once, that has been excelled well, the buyers can be brought in.
- Balancing the Supply Side: You, as the marketplace have to ensure that not all the business is going to the top performing suppliers only. If that happens there is no value for other suppliers. This needs to be managed well.
- Service Delivery Stack: For any marketplace the following are the themes, service areas to be considered for value delivery. Depending on the business objective, each marketplace tries to deliver value on one or more of these themes and tries to cater to the customer needs within each of these themes.
4. Customer’s Pain Level in Different Service Areas of a Marketplace: In different service industries (here theatres, buses, restaurants, hotels) the pain level of the customer in the service areas discussed above is different. The areas where pain level is high, there is a larger opportunity to build a business.
5. Marketplace Business Models (Examples): In congruence with #4, the following are some of the companies that saw the opportunities in the different service areas and tried to solve it. A lot of times, a company may start off with solving a small service area as a problem and then work its way towards the entire stack slowly. For example, Zomato started off with solving the problem of Information — Factual (Menu, Location, etc being available online), then it got to Information — Quality (Ratings and Reviews). Slowly and gradually then they got into Discovery of Restaurants, Booking (table booking), Food Delivery and so on.
Apart from these we had a ton of discussion around Practo’s journey from where it started to today, the challenges they have to face because of being in a sensitive industry of Healthcare and how they are/they have overcome those challenges and thrive with a suite of product offerings that they have today for patients and doctors.
Overall, this was a wonderful event by Cohortplus and a beautiful Zeta HQ office to be in. Looking forward to the next product management meetup.
