3 Sided Marketplaces

The creative capacity of the Internet is cool. Patrick Collison of Stripe highlighted this a couple months ago with the following tweet:

There’s certainly legs to this phenomenon with more room to run. As I’ve mentioned to a few folks, an interesting model in my mind is Opendesk. Companies or consumers (buyers) looking for quality, craft furniture go to the website where a crowdsourced community of artisans (designers) have uploaded designs that local manufacturers (producers) can create. I like the 3 sided marketplace that connects buyers, designers, and producers for several reasons.

First, it provides a way to bridge the online and offline worlds with regards to physical assets and projects. Examples could include furniture (in Opendesk’s instance), homes, renovation projects, office fit-outs, public infrastructure, etc. Good design matters with this type of stuff, but creating a library of designs “SKU-ifies” assets or projects, making them easier for producers to implement in the physical world. An interesting company to watch is Block Renovation.

Furthermore, the 3 sided marketplace model enables two sets of people to generate income streams — a creative class and a producer class. To me, this matters a lot. It’s not quite the same parallel, but CRV recently wrote a great post on this topic. Especially for the creatives and designers, the library of designs can lead to an evergreen revenue stream. There’s also some interesting network and community dynamics that can come to play on the creative side. The question that emerges for me is: what does Dribbble for X look like?

Even though we’re a couple decades into the life of the Internet, marketplaces continue to evolve on the platform, and the 3 sided (buyer, designer, producer) frame could be useful tool in the future.

This post was part of a larger series I wrote at the end of 2018. You can check out the other ones here. If you’d like to get in touch, you can reach me at aashaysanghvi[at]gmail.com.