Platform 4 Future

B2B Marketplaces — recipes to success

In our conversation with Adrien Nussenbaum, Co-Founder and U.S. CEO of Mirakl, he gave us lots of insights and key success factors regarding the 3 lifestages of a platform, how to set up a platform initiative as an incumbent company and how platforms can create a more sustainable business.

Mirakl started its journey in 2012 with the vision of the digital revolution in the retail industry. Initially based in France, Mirakl today is operating on a global level as one of the leading providers of marketplace infrastructure solutions. With their Software-as-a-Service model Mirakl helps traditional retailers, manufacturers and distributors to cope with the emerging requirements to adapt to new business models and transform into online marketplaces across different industries. Up to today, Mirakl enabled over 300 businesses to open-up marketplaces in their specific industries. And this makes them a perfect guest for our podcast to talk about best practices and trends in setting up and scaling a platform.

In our conversation with Adrien Nussenbaum, Co-Founder and u.S. CEO of Mirakl, he gave us lots of insights and key success factors regarding the 3 lifestages of a platform, how to set up a platform initiative as an incumbent company and how platforms can create a more sustainable business.

How to find your unique platform opportunity

The first important stage of building a successful B2B-Marketplace is finding your unique platform opportunity. According to Adrien, the very primal thing you need to do is “look at the broader world that surrounds you and ask yourself a simple question: ”Are there transactions happening in that broader world that could happen through you?” Based on the identified transactions and the related inefficiencies you can platformize them in a more qualitative or efficient way so that it creates a value for all the players on your platform.

As a next step you have to decide whether to chase a defensive or offensive platform strategy. Each of them has its own challenges. A defensive strategy is more like „entering a platform strategy in a reactionary mode and when you do that, the challenge is to react really fast and well“, as Adrien explains. So you join an already existing platform ecosystem while an offensive strategy on the other hand means digitizing everything around your core product in a way nobody has done yet.

Adrien points out a huge challenge especially for start ups, because they have to start really from scratch without any partners or brand advantages which could enable a successful platform from the very beginning. Regarding incumbent companies he sees another problem in terms of understanding the own legitimacy:

And so the legitimacy is really waking up to understanding that in a digital world, becoming a platform is understanding your assets can allow you to create an infrastructure business.

Adrien Nussenbaum, Co-founder and U.S. CEO of Mirakl

Talking about key success factors

Out of his longstanding learnings from working with over 300 companies worldwide, Adrien takes away some key success factors of building a platform. For a better understanding he summarized them to three really important aspects:

• a top-down platform initiative
• a platform strategy which fits your business and its integration
• understanding the long term transformation of a platform program

Accompanying this, it is indispensable for an organization „to learn and adjust quickly to what this program is going to create in your company“, like adapting your go-to-market or pricing strategy according to changes in your environment.

Do you want to learn more about key factors to success that will help you to build your own B2B marketplace? Check out the whole article or listen to our Platforms 4 Future podcast episode via your favorite streaming platform.

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