Notes on building two-sided marketplaces from $0 to $1 Billion

What do Uber, Airbnb, eBay, Mogul Villa, Thumbtack, and Fiverr have in common? They’re all examples of two-sided market places.

I recently studied a talk given by Brian Rothenberg who was the Co-Head of Marketing at TaskRabbit and is the current VP of Growth at Eventbrite.
You can find his talk here if you’d like to watch it.

What is a two-sided market place?

Two-sided marketplaces have, as you may expect, two sides- which is different than the way most companies operate. Traditionally, an organization will make a product or offer a service and sell it to their customers.

With two-sided marketplaces, organizations act in a middle-man capacity with supply coming from individuals on one side and demand coming from a separate market of individuals on the other side.

Rothenberg cites some examples of this operating model in detailing that “something is transacted between these two sides. With Airbnb it’s spaces, with Eventbrite it’s events, for Uber it’s car rides.”

What makes marketplace businesses so valuable?

Liquidity.