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Why we picked it Tavel, a marketplace investor at Benchmark, argues that the first thing to solve is user happiness in a small, constrained market, not scale or headline volume. That is a useful counterweight to chasing listings for their own sake: a directory or marketplace that makes one narrow group genuinely happy is worth more than a big empty one. Read it to decide who you will delight first. It also warns against vanity metrics that make you feel busy without progress.
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces
From Sarah Tavel by Sarah Tavel
- Win one narrow group completely before expanding
- Happiness of users, not raw volume, is the real moat
- Big empty listings are a vanity metric, not traction
