Essay

The Hierarchy of Marketplaces

Sarah Tavel Free Intermediate

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.

  • 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
Open on sarahtavel.medium.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. 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?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  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. The fastest path from a spreadsheet to a polished mobile or internal app, used by 100k+ companies. When your data lives in... glideapps.com Tool · platform Glide, Apps From Spreadsheets Glide
  4. The simplest way to build client portals and internal tools on top of Airtable, Notion, or Sheets. Low learning curve, fast to... softr.io Tool · platform Softr, Portals & Internal Tools, No Code Softr
  5. The Neon Show (formerly 100x Entrepreneur) is one of India's deepest founder-and-investor interview podcasts, covering pricing,... neon.fund Podcast · podcast series (200+ episodes) The Neon Show, Indian Founders on Pricing, Sales & Building Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  6. 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
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →