How Indiegogo Grew its Business
This is the fourth and final post covering speakers’ insights from our marketplace meetup held in San Francisco on October 20. If you haven’t already, check out previous posts detailing Andrew Chen’s (Uber) fireside chat on growth strategies, Anthony Marino’s (ThredUp) talk on managed marketplaces, and B2B marketplace dynamics from Shippo’s Mikhail Ledvich. The first […]
Go Big or Go Home: It’s a binary outcome for marketplace start-ups
It’s typically a binary outcome for marketplace start-ups at the beginning: either you figure out the chicken-and-egg problem or you don’t. But, marketplaces can face a binary outcome at the other end too: either you scale your marketplace into a large, stand-alone company that can go public, or you find yourself with few other exit […]
The evolution of the online marketplace: six big changes since Ebay
It has been twenty years since Ebay arrived on the scene and showed what happens when you bring people together over the Internet to do commerce. Since then, there has been tremendous innovation within online marketplaces. Startups have honed in on every vertical imaginable, branched out from product to services, and tested out new paths […]
How we determine valuations for marketplaces
I often get asked about how to determine the valuation for a marketplace startup that is starting to scale. So I’ll run through some basic math for how we value marketplaces at version one. The main multiple we like to use for marketplace businesses is GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume…the total volume of goods sold on […]
How to scale a marketplace
As a marketplace figures out how to bring buyers and sellers together and builds liquidity, the virtuous cycle starts kicking in. The growth of sellers and buyers quickly accelerates. The ultimate goal is that a successful startup grows into a big company. But as you begin to scale, there are new considerations and strategies to […]