Online marketplaces such as Airbnb, Turo, Hipcamp, Grailed, and others have shown that sharing economies can unlock valuable assets and in turn create massive marketplace businesses. But marketplaces have typically been very hard to build and launch in the past.
In this post, I’ll take you step-by-step through taking your marketplace idea to MVP using a marketplace platform solution. We’ll remove some of the constraints faced when looking to build and launch a marketplace if you don’t having coding skills.
Please note that this is also a video formatted post. I’ve found that the best way to be as specific as possible is by directly screen sharing the entire process from start to finish and using a real example.
Introduction
Before we get started, it’s worth mentioning that there are many options to choose when picking the right way (software platform solution, tech stack, tools, etc) and approach to building your marketplace. There are also many considerations, which can also be specific to you and your marketplace concept.
For the sake of keeping this generally applicable to those looking to take their idea to marketplace MVP without coding, I’ll be using Sharetribe’s turnkey marketplace platform solution, which they call Sharetribe GO. I consider this to be a great way to take an idea to marketplace MVP without coding or software development skills needed.
I’ve used Sharetribe and their various marketplace solutions for a few years, and have extensive experience working with it. I’ve even customized it to meet my specific marketplace needs as marketplaces I’ve built and launched have scaled (specifically Studiotime).
You can read more on the story of how I built and launched Studiotime in an evening here. It’s now the largest online marketplace for booking music studios in the world and it’s in 35+ countries!
Part 1: Signing up for Sharetribe and basic marketplace setup
As mentioned above, we’ll be using Sharetribe GO, which is their hosted marketplace platform. This is a turnkey marketplace solution and accounts for product and goods, services, spaces, and other marketplace types.
Using the video below, we’ll go ahead and walk through the process of signup (here), to setting up our demo marketplace for renting music studios.
This 23 min video goes takes you from signup to basic marketplace setup.
Part 2: Marketplace configuration specific to your concept and marketplace requirements
This 7 min video covers how to account for specific marketplace requirements you might have using configurations.
Part 3: Final marketplace configuration, prep for external testing, and launch!
This final 8 min video wraps up the final steps so you’ll be ready to launch your marketplace!
Resources:
Click here to visit my Airtable page and see a complete listing of other Sharetribe Marketplace MVP Examples.
Hopefully you found this guide and all of the resources above useful! If you have any specific questions when building your own marketplace, you can send them to me on Twitter (I’m @Yoroomie), where I’m quick to reply.
You can also check out my YouTube channel with more tutorials, how-to videos, and insights into building, launching, and scaling marketplaces.
This post was written by Mike Williams (Founder of Thinkbox and Codeity, as well as a Graduate and Mentor of the Los Angeles Founder Institute), and was originally published on Medium.
Thinkbox is a startup studio that helps build and invests in startups. We're not your normal startup venture studio. We're completely bootstrap and have launched our own startups such as Studiotime (Airbnb for music studios), Yoroomie App (acquired 2016), worked with some amazing startups, and reinvested our profits in 15+ startups and two funds.
