Podcast · ~1 hr

Building a SaaS-enabled marketplace for Indian manufacturers (Sourcewiz)

Siddhartha Ahluwalia · The Neon Show Free Intermediate India

An Indian founder walks through building a two-sided marketplace in a fragmented local market, including how pairing software with the marketplace helped pull supply on board. It is grounded in Indian buyer and seller behavior rather than Silicon Valley examples. Useful if you are building here and want a local reference point.

  • A SaaS tool for one side can pull that side onto the marketplace.
  • Indian supply is fragmented, so concentrate before expanding.
  • Local trust and hand-holding matter for winning early sellers.

The question it answers

  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?

Read with it

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  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. A YC partner and ex-Airbnb growth lead gives a tactical, no-fluff talk on landing early customers for both B2B and B2C. It's... YC Startup Library Video · ~30 min video How to Get Your First Customers Gustaf Alstromer (Y Combinator)
  4. Andrew Chen ran rider growth at Uber and now invests at a16z, so this is the canonical breakdown of how marketplaces get off... andrewchen.com Essay · ~20 min read Required reading for marketplace startups: The 20 best essays Andrew Chen
  5. For a two-sided marketplace, the first real decision is which side to define and win first, and this essay makes the case... NFX Essay · Long read (about 25 minutes) 19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace James Currier
  6. This is the canonical a16z reference that defines the marketplace vocabulary you actually need before you build a model: GMV vs... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Essay 13 Metrics Every Marketplace Company Should Track Jeff Jordan, Li Jin, D'Arcy Coolican, Andrew Chen (a16z)
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