The Lean Marketplace: a Practical Guide to Building a Successful Online Marketplace Business Paperback – February 23, 2018

If you're thinking about starting an online marketplace, buy this book now. It will show you all kinds of strategies, good advice based on real-world experience, things NOT to do, sensible ways to launch quietly (and correct course, if neccesary), before you aim for world dominance. I read the first six chapters of this book as a downloadble free .pdf. that I annotated/marked up on almost every page. I was so impressed I ordered a printed copy so that I could see the rest of what they had to say.The two authors are business school grads who also own a marketplace platform (sharetribe.com) which enables you to quickly build and deploy an online marketplace. (I don't use their excellent platform, having already commited to another.)it's obvious that they have spoken to 100s of their customers who run marketplaces. Plus, they have studied the recent history of marketplaces like craigslist, ebay, and airbnb, ec., at an academic level. (But the book is not written in an academic style.). It's very helpful if you are a solo entrepreneur trying to solve all the problems of marketplaces by yourself.

Each sentence in this book was useful for anyone who wants to start, make successful, make better, or grow an online forum/platform/marketplace. I am running a neighborhood communication platform (nappinaapuri.fi) that is not a marketplace in the sense that people would be making purchases from each other, but this book nailed all the important problems we have faced and are facing, and gave solutions. It starts from the idea and its validation and first version, to all the steps and considerations towards actually scaling and remaining successful. It works as a check list to everyone running a platform: it lists all the important things platforms need (like trust and community) as well as what is needed for the platform to be viable as a business (like market size, competitors, metrics, pricing). It also refers to books and articles about the matter, and gives a lot of interesting facts about current marketplaces and their path towards growth. It gives links to further reading, which is very useful. What the book doesn't do is those parts that I usually skip in current business books: long stories about Pixar or someone's childhood moments, and pages after pages about how everything is about evolution psychology. In this book, I didn't skip a page.The book is based both on writers' personal experiences in starting and struggling with - and finally succeeding - with online marketplaces, as well as to a lot of accumulated knowledge from following the field for years.Highly reccommended! As said, provides a very good check list for starting and running an online marketplace or other social platform.

The Lean Marketplace offers valuable insights into starting your own online marketplace. A succinct guide, it takes you from how to think about marketplace ideas, to launching and growing your marketplace. Nothing profoundly new is introduced in this book, however it does an excellent job summarizing a broad range of information and also provides links to read more in-depth on topics if interested. Worth a read.

This book serves as a great introduction, a checklist and a step-by-step guide to platform building. It's an easy read and avoids going deep into the nitty gritty. Great thing is that the book includes links to a mass of sources, should you want to dive deeper into a specific topic. You can also get the list of links as an email, which should help one reading the book on paper or on Kindle.If you are new to platforms and their theory, I suggest you read this book first and then continue to the likes of Platform Scale by Sangeet Paul Choudary or Platform Revolution by Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary.It often feels that books totaling hundreds of pages have about 20 pages of good content and the rest is just filling. The Lean Marketplace is different. Sometimes you just want the beef and this one is one tasty beef indeed.

I'm very happy I ordered this guide. The two authors have a wealth of experience and benefit from a matured marketplace industry that enables real data and actionable insights to be shared from some of the biggest and earliest marketplaces in the world. The book speaks directly to topics that all entrepreneurs should be focused on to launch quickly and sustain growth. Interestingly, they recommend against rapid growth in many cases - even when supply and demand are plentiful - in favor of slow growth that enables bugs, and kinks of the business model to be worked out. I can't recommend this book enough and it's worth 10x what I paid.

I found the lean marketplace surprisingly full of numerous helpful tips and specific instructions to set me up for success in building a marketplace. There was just enough theory to have it all come together but it was really all the practical tips and steps that I found really helpful in this book.

This is well structured, very focused and laconic material. The authors made great job and summarized a wast amount of materials in quite short and easy readable form. The suggestions and guidance from this book helped a lot for my project SaaS enabled EdTech marketplace connecting hundreds of language tutors with private or enterprise/B2B students eager to master their language skills through in-person or online individual or group lessons.You can easily apply the structure and KPIs described in this book for "any purposes" marketplaces or SaaS platform.

Shows you so many examples of real marketplaces, gives you so much information from different sources that will help you understand more how marketplaces work and their fundamentals, really great book for entrepreneurs that have an idea 💡 for a marketplace.