Shopify founder Tobi Lutke explains the most common mistake people make building two-sided platforms

Booting up any two sided marketplace is tricky. You have to overcome a ticking net problems. It's tricky, but if you manage to do it, this is also really, really self sustaining afterwards. So many businesses lend themselves to being turned into platforms later. The problem is everyone tries to build a platform first and that's really, really, really hard. It's much better to extract a platform out of a working like a working piece of software that people are already using. And so that helped us like people were already trading themes as zip files and we're like okay, well we can help with that. And people are already building things for themselves on the APIs for integrating their own ERP systems. And all these kind of things ended up being incredibly valuable for the community. It's definitely one of the coolest aspects to build. But again, at the end of the day, what all of this is is you build really good software that solves real problems very, very quickly and and then you build a bit of a game theoretical system on top in which people being selfish about wanting to build something accrue a huge amount of value to the community to shopify to the merchants and so on.