Launch a Marketplace Business

Airbnb's founders sold cereal boxes to fund the company and personally photographed listings because hosts couldn't be bothered. Etsy nearly died before its IPO. Faire manually curated a tiny catalog for a handful of San Francisco shops. Every great marketplace started as a ghost town — and survived only because the founders solved the cold-start problem one supply-side participant at a time.

Inside this book:

• The marketplace model: network effects, take rates, and why this is hard
• Choosing your category and defining your wedge
• Solving the cold-start problem: getting your first 100 supply-side users
• Building the MVP — technology, trust, and transaction infrastructure
• Demand-side acquisition that doesn't burn unit economics
• Liquidity, matching, and the tipping-point dynamics
• Take rates, monetization, and defending your position at scale

For operators tackling the hardest — and most defensible — business model in tech.