Helping marketplace entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses: Introducing the Marketplace Academy
It’s been a great year for us at Sharetribe. Since our big launch a year ago, hundreds of marketplace businesses have been started on our platform. Today, we’re approaching 500 paying subscribers on our hosted solution, and our open source code is being downloaded dozens of times each week.
However, during the past year, we realized something. Technology alone is not enough to make a marketplace business successful. The most difficult part of creating a marketplace is building the community — solving the chicken and egg problem — and truly providing value for your users. Until now, our focus has been on the technology, but in order to make our customers succeed, we need to help them with the non-technical aspects as well.
Luckily, there is a lot of knowledge and best practices out there. Many people have written about marketplace-related topics before, but this information is scattered around the web. The quality of the advice varies a lot, and someone who is new to marketplaces will have a hard time separating the wheat from the chaff.
That’s where our new initiative comes in. We’re very proud to present the Marketplace Academy.
The best online source for marketplace advice
The goal of the Marketplace Academy is to be a fully fledged online learning portal for anyone interested in building an online marketplace business. We’re going to write about everything we’ve learned over the past 8 years. We will also be curating the best information from around the web, by the foremost experts in the field. All of this will be available for everyone, for free.
And there’s more. We host close to 500 marketplaces (with the number growing daily), and are thus in a unique position. We are able to analyze the data from all of these marketplaces (anonymized, of course) to understand the patterns and practices that make marketplaces work.
Entrepreneurs should not need to reinvent the wheel when creating the platform for their marketplace business. That’s why Sharetribe was created. Similarly, you should not have to learn everything the hard way when growing your business. If I knew everything about marketplaces that I know now, my first attempts in 2008 would have fared a lot better. I don’t want others to make the same mistakes I made. That’s just waste. Our goal with the Academy is to reduce this wasted effort.
Some highlights of the initial content include A practical guide for building an online marketplace business. It’s a step-by-step guide that will take you from idea to market. I’ve been writing it together with collaborative economy expert Cristóbal Gracia, and we’re really proud of the results. The guide will contain at least 16 chapters in total. We will be publishing a new chapter every other week, so be sure to subscribe to be notified of new content.
To provide a source of inspiration, we’ve also been interviewing thought leaders and experts in marketplaces and the collaborative economy. The first interviews are with Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, and Shelby Clark, the founder of RelayRides. Expect more inspiring interviews soon!
Go dive in! We really hope you like it. If there are some topics in particular that you would like us to write about, please let us know!
- Juho
