Launch A Two-Sided Market, Rinse, Repeat

The world’s biggest company, Amazon, is a two-sided market between sellers and consumers. Among some of the other big companies you could name, such as Airbnb and Uber, it’s a common theme with the same model. If you want to go big, go biggest. Play matchmaker between two sides.

Of course, just being a matchmaker isn’t enough. From my experience working on a few of these sorts of companies, I’ve found that scaling up requires innovation. It takes strategy. It’s hard. But once you’ve built out this business model, you can keep building it.

To win with both sides of the market, you need to use data to make those sides useful to each other.

Amazon built the customer side first. It built all the infrastructure behind the scenes and then scaled up its two-sided market rapidly. It gave independent sellers access to a vast customer base. It became great when it could match everything to everyone. The more a two-sided market scales up, the easier it is to grow even more.

But before you can scale, you need to define your marketplace. You’ll need to figure out who your buyers and sellers are and then find that product-market fit (for both sides). To get there, you should be absolutely obsessed with numbers. You’ll want to capture them right from your marketing effort, to sign-up, to transaction. Build the…