This post should be placed under an entrepreneur's must read list. We're doing a marketplace play with Cloudomatic and it was really re-assuring (and scary) to hear some things we've seen echoed.
a) Building two businesses is really scary.
b) Focus on sellers first is definitely right. You'll never have any buyers if you don't have any sellers. The worst case scenario for a seller if there are no buyers is an increase of zero / a loss of nothing. Things can only go up.
c) Pay per lead works great here. The listing fee up front is hard to do and usually penny wise + pound foolish. We have close to 500 apps. I bet if we tried to charge a small 50 dollar fee to be on cloudomatic we might have gotten it from some devs, but we'd have a lot less apps (maybe 25 total?).
d) Content is really important as a way to gain traffic on the buyer side. It worked well for Mint. I consider Mint to be a marketplace at its core (connect people (buyers) with better finance deals (sellers)).
a) Building two businesses is really scary.
b) Focus on sellers first is definitely right. You'll never have any buyers if you don't have any sellers. The worst case scenario for a seller if there are no buyers is an increase of zero / a loss of nothing. Things can only go up.
c) Pay per lead works great here. The listing fee up front is hard to do and usually penny wise + pound foolish. We have close to 500 apps. I bet if we tried to charge a small 50 dollar fee to be on cloudomatic we might have gotten it from some devs, but we'd have a lot less apps (maybe 25 total?).
d) Content is really important as a way to gain traffic on the buyer side. It worked well for Mint. I consider Mint to be a marketplace at its core (connect people (buyers) with better finance deals (sellers)).