Essay

13 Metrics Every Marketplace Company Should Track

Jeff Jordan, Li Jin, D'Arcy Coolican, Andrew Chen (a16z) · Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Free Intermediate

This is the canonical a16z reference that defines the marketplace vocabulary you actually need before you build a model: GMV vs revenue, take rate, match rate, and market depth (which is how liquidity really shows up). It keeps you honest about the fact that a marketplace has two sides to feed, so your unit economics have to reflect both supply and demand, not just orders. Treat it as the shared language, then plug your own numbers into it.

  • GMV is not revenue: your revenue is only the take rate slice of GMV, so model the two separately from day one
  • Liquidity is the make-or-break metric, tracked as match rate and time to match, not as headline user counts
  • Unit economics for a marketplace has to fold in the cost of building both sides, since supply attracts demand and vice versa
Open on a16z.com ↗

It answers 4 questions

  1. I'm a solo technical founder. How do I MVP a two-sided marketplace when I need both buyers and sellers before it works at all?
  2. How do I define an ideal customer for a two-sided marketplace where I have to pick two of them?
  3. I'm building outside the big startup hubs with almost no budget. What's the cheapest no-code stack to launch a marketplace or directory?
  4. How do I model unit economics for a marketplace where I have to acquire both supply and demand?

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