This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "Why B2B Marketplaces Are Great Businesses" (posted 2024-01-21). The excerpt is a short interview/discussion between two speakers (labelled SPEAKER A and SPEAKER B) about B2B marketplaces — why the speaker was attracted to them, their relationship-driven and human-centered nature, defensibility as a business model, references to ACV and people-based operations, and brief notes on how AI and changing hiring/experience channels may be affecting marketplaces.
Chapters
Marketplaces is somewhat specific and then even more so B2B marketplaces, right? So what initially kind of attracted you to B2B marketplaces and I guess why do you think they make great businesses?
I'll be honest, even though I'd spent a lot of time when I was younger in retail, the way retail or B2C is today, I just, I don't get, I don't understand. I'm not a child of social media and I think B2B was kind of, it just made sense. It was heavily relationship-based versus, you know, I can't tell you the first thing about return on ad spend and how to do digital marketing. And it's funny when we talk about ACV, you'll hear how little of those things actually happen. But I always thought of B2B as just relationship-based, you know, marketplaces where you had to find a way to have people both trust this non-human entity, this business, in the case of ACV itself, but still be able to increase this user experience because humans wanna deal with humans, humans trust humans. Everybody knows that people built systems. And so I thought it was a really interesting way to do that. I think a marketplace is the most defensible type of business model. Sure. I mean, you know, I had spent some time in my 20s in deep tech, but I would say the most naturally defensible business model because I truly think, you know, I used to tell people ACV wasn't a business of cars, it was a business of people and dealing with relationships. And you could just see if you go on LinkedIn and you Google all the different job names that potentially fall under customer service, whether that's sales or customer success or operations, It's really just a human business. And I'm really interested, I mean, again, like I also represent a founder in the generation right before really the dawn of AI. So I don't know if, you know, now looking at marketplaces, I still am also a child of the game too, trying to understand how are things changing now that it's, you know, not how do you recruit the best person to be able to give the best customer experience, but there are more options than just finding the best person on the other side of the phone or the keyboard. So, you know, I've just always loved them and I think life is short and I think it's great to be able to get into the niches and nuances of these different industries. I really think that marketplaces have the ability to absorb, the best ones absorb and take advantage of the unique characteristics of the industries that they're in. So I just think they're cool.
