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 build their companies. That’s because we realized that while there is a lot of great information for tech startups, not much of it deals specifically with marketplaces. And anyone building a marketplace company knows that marketplaces face unique challenges – including how to solve the chicken and egg problem with supply and demand and how to monetize when services are delivered offline.

To that end, we put together a handbook, A Guide to Marketplaces. It compiles many of the insights we’ve learned from working with great marketplace companies and analyzing the industry.

We hope the handbook helps you in your own journey to break down walls in how goods and services are bought and sold. There’s no single way to build and scale a marketplace, but the book can help you figure out your own path to build supply and spark the virtuous circle of supply and demand.

Download the PDF or ePub version of the handbook and refer to it as you need it.

Lastly, we’d love to hear if you find the content useful. What should we expand on? Did we leave anything out? Please leave a comment below or reach out to us directly.

Happy reading!

Angela and Boris

May 2016 Update:  we summarized this handbook in slide deck form for quick reference which you can access here.

March 2018 Update: we just published the second edition of this handbook here.