Marketplaces are shifting from renting underused physical assets like spare rooms to monetizing skills and talents. A second trend: founders now build communities around shared interests first, then design products for them, rather than launching a product and hunting for users.
startups and marketplaces in particular also is definitely evolving right now. So I'd love to learn more about how you've seen them evolve maybe more recently, and then maybe even some interesting trends too.
So kind of on the Web2 marketplace concept, I think the 2 most interesting trends that I've seen over the last couple of years is— I mean, I guess the first one is If you think of marketplaces and a lot of the marketplaces that have been successful and built in the last kind of 10, 15 years, a lot of the kind of core thesis is taking something that is underutilized or where there's a kind of latent asset or latent skill and kind of making it, helping people put it to better use. And so I think we saw a lot of ones where that worked from an asset standpoint, whether it was somebody who's house with Airbnb in which you monetize the kind of spare room, whether it's like the yard. I know there's like swimming pools, there's garages, there's kind of like marketplaces that help you take any kind of asset you own. And I mean, SniffSpot is one that helps you do yards. Neighbor is one that helps you do garages. Swimply is one that helps you do pools. There's kind of a different kind of marketplace for every kind of asset. And Jeff Jordan wrote an amazing article on this. If anybody has kind of, has the time, you can just Google it. I think, and the asset one were probably easier. I think things that you're seeing now are people with kind of latent talents and figuring out how to help create economic opportunity for a lot of those latent talents that exist. And so that, whether that's coach, I mean, chef is like an interesting example, being able to, in some ways it's probably at the intersection of asset and talent. in that the asset is a kitchen, which may be underutilized and people can use it to cook from home. But in a lot of ways, it's just a talent. People who are amazing chefs and can tell an amazing story around the cuisine that they create, you are helping them create a business around that latent talent. And I think whether it's coaching, teaching, any of these skill sets that people have that maybe right now they're not able to actually create a business around. I think you're seeing more and more of the kind of energy shift to kind of that end of the spectrum. And not that this wasn't tried before, I think it's all kind of— the internet's like 25, 30 years old, so a lot of this stuff has been tried before, but I think we're reaching a time where people know how to kind of build these businesses. People know how to build these kinds of products and the kind of demand is there for a lot of these things that probably didn't exist before. So I think that's kind of one trend is kind of, as we've seen the shift away from kind of like assets to talent. Another one is kind of the idea of like building community first. Another trend that you've seen over the last kind of 5, 10 years is It used to be you built the product and then you figure out how to market and distribute and get users into the product. User acquisition is so much harder now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So you're seeing kind of like an inversion of it where people will build the community. They'll find a bunch of people that they think have kind of a similar perspective on the world, a similar kind of pain point. They'll figure out how to kind of create a sense of community. And then from that, they'll figure out the products that make sense. And so a lot of kind of the more interesting marketplaces that we're seeing now, and I actually think a lot of this comes in the gaming world, is kind of places where people have built community and then figured out like, how can you actually take that network and build kind of platforms that help them and products that help them kind of solve some of their pain points? So, you know, I think we've seen the inversion of, you know, if you build it, they will come to, you know, if you figure out a way to kind of bring them all to one place, then you can build a kind of world on marketplaces.
Yeah. That's great. And it also kind of circles back to your earlier comment with Frank about distribution, whatnot, with community.
Yeah. I mean, it used to be that you could buy Facebook ads or there was just the user acquisition channels were kind of less saturated or less optimized. You know, now it's just harder. And so, you know, you really need to think about how to differentiate on the acquisition side, not just on the product side.
