What can you make with our Open Source solution? (2)
We provide all the tools you will need to launch your app. After that, start gathering your community and building network effect on the blockchain.
BitBoost’s Open Source Project (OSP) provides a suite of powerful tools to enable developers to build their own marketplace applications. As we discussed in our first post, one of your first tasks should be to engage with and poll the community to determine your market niche and establish demand. After that, you’ll need to start putting together the first iteration of your software.
Why use BitBoost for your app?
There are many options for blockchain developers, but we believe that BitBoost’s Open Source solution is one of the most user-friendly and attractive. There are several reasons you might want to use it for your marketplace app:
- It’s open source — meaning the code is yours to use and alter however you want, and it can be audited by anyone. That naturally leads to greater security than closed source toolkits, which is absolutely critical when dealing with financial applications.
- It’s based on Ethereum, the most mature and battle-tested smart contracts platform in existence.
- It’s built by a team of experienced devs and is well-documented, so you won’t waste unnecessary time trying to figure out how it works.
- It has been extensively tested in our own app, BitBoost Marketplace.
- It’s designed to be customised, so you can adapt it easily for your own purposes.
In short, it’s fast, low-cost, and straightforward to start building on BitBoost’s open source software, and we’d love it if you did — this benefits both you and the wider community.
Building your app
After some initial research, you’ll be ready to put together the first version of your app. As an open source blockchain platform, BitBoost has its own community of users and developers. You’ll also have the wider blockchain and Ethereum communities to draw upon for support. Developing network effect on the blockchain and in the wider crypto world will be a major factor in gaining users and building momentum, so start early.
Ensure you read the relevant documentation carefully, whenever it is published or updated. Then discuss it with developers in the community if that is useful — either to you or them. Helping others builds goodwill. When you share your own progress and ask for feedback, people will be more inclined to help you improve your marketplace in return.
Think about releasing early versions of your software to closed groups of testers. Not only does that allow the community to help you refine your app, but it shows everyone you’re progressing with working software.
Marketing and business development
This stage also constitutes the beginning of your marketing strategy. Since these people won’t just be helping you build and refine your app — they will be some of your first customers too — getting involved with the community is vital. Getting 10 happy users at this point will be your road to attracting 1,000 dedicated ones further down the line. Choose your testers wisely and you might be able to cut some of the legwork required in your early business development effort.
A lot of entrepreneurs try to start with online advertising, SEO, and other strategies to gain a large userbase, but building a small community of loyal users is a critical first stage. Scaling can come later, when you’re confident of your niche and value proposition. A good early strategy is to reach out to a small group of key users or connectors directly. Explain the benefits that your solution offers over the alternatives. If you can articulate why you can genuinely solve a problem they have, you’ll be well on the way to gaining your first customers — and have taken your first steps to commercial success. If they’re also the ones helping bugfix and even suggest new features, so much the better.
Network effect
As you’ll no doubt be aware, turning a great idea into a commercial success is about more than building amazing software. For marketplaces as much as any platform, it’s about building network effect — in short, the more people use it, the more attractive it is to other potential new users.
If you’re looking for more information about how to build a successful marketplace, you could do a lot worse than read this guide, co-written by JustBooks founder Boris Wertz (JustBooks was acquired by AbeBooks in 2002, which was itself acquired by Amazon in 2008.) Marketplaces come in many forms, but all aggregate sellers and their inventories to build a large pool of goods or services for people to buy.
Network effect on your blockchain marketplace is no different to any other marketplace. Wertz shows that establishing that all-important momentum starts starts with working with the supply side. Determine a vertical, pick a location, and look for your first sellers. By picking a vertical you focus on known (assuming you’ve done your homework) demand, and by starting in one place you build local popularity on a small scale, rather than spreading your effort too thinly. It’s vitally important that you build liquidity on both sides — in other words, that you have enough buyers and enough sellers that the free market can establish a fair price for goods and people think your marketplace is actually worth using.
The other factor in getting started is building trust — critical when you’re dealing with users’ money. Blockchain is ideal for this, because trust isn’t a matter of policy: it’s a question of maths. By outsourcing the financial element of your marketplace to the blockchain, you’re essentially sidestepping the problem of trust and demonstrating to your users that you’ll be honest with them because you don’t have a choice. The blockchain’s transparency and permissionless nature is a strong selling point if articulated well.
