Our guide to marketplaces

Note: We’ve updated this handbook — read the latest and greatest 3rd edition here! At Version One, we love marketplaces. Just look at our portfolio, and you’ll understand how important we think marketplaces are to the future of commerce. Over the past year, we have focused much of our blog content on helping marketplace founders […]
Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 3/3): measuring engagement by relationships
Over the past two weeks, we have introduced our social platform KPI dashboard to track the key metrics for social platform startups. We first covered the high-level metrics (such as DAU, MAU and stickiness) and then took a deeper dive into content engagement. When we talked about engagement, we related it to a specific action […]
Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 2/3): Measuring engagement by content
Last week, we introduced our social platform KPI dashboard to help provide a framework for founders to think about their businesses and preempt the inevitable questions that arise during the fundraising process. In the first post, we talked about the high-level metrics to track – such as DAU, MAU, and your stickiness ratio. In the […]
Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 1/3)
A few months ago, we wrote about the data we focus on to evaluate marketplaces and later shared a marketplace KPI dashboard that we created to guide founders on the important metrics they should track. As we have been developing our investment thesis on social platforms, we want to provide the similar information and tools. There are […]
Network effects on social platforms: why the quality of user matters
Back in July, we wrote about network effects in marketplaces and social platforms and how they are critical to defensibility. In the post, we talked about the difference between direct and indirect network effects, and how they may or may not relate to virality. Since then, we have been further developing our investment thesis on […]