1/ new essay: What's next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that's what. Co-authored with @ljin18 https://t.co/fgKbrHTnH5. A short thread 👇

2/ Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but have been less successful services. It's bc services are complex, subjective, fragmented, and often in real life. Makes it hard
3/ There's been 4 major eras at making the service economy work online. The Listings Era, the unbundled Craiglist era, the Uber for X era, and the Managed Marketplace era
4/ Each era has added more value than the last, and utilized technology innovations, from internet to social / "read/write web" to mobile. The "Unbundling Craigslist" era was particularly epic at generating startup ideas
5/ The problem is, all the low-hanging fruit has been picked off. The techniques that got us to here won't get us to the next phase. So we have to do some pretty different things. That's why "Managed Marketplaces" have been a big deal - hire folks as W-2s, certify quality, etc.
6/ All the learnings from the previous generation of marketplaces will be needed - and more! - to unlock the next phase. Which will be focused on regulated, licensed professions. This is everything from teaching, legal work, healthcare, and more. This represents trillions (!!).
7/ Here's a view of what all of these sectors might look like.
8/ Licensing *really* made sense information asymmetries existed all over the place, between consumers and providers. The taxi medallion meant something. But in a world of real-time info, GPS, user reviews, and mapping - don't we trust their rating more than their medallion?
9/ Feel free to argue about the value of licensing. It's not zero. But it holds back a lot of labor supply and makes the services expensive. Here's a view on the % of workers that require certification/licensing, in a world where it's certainly less useful and maybe just obsolete
10/ If you agree with the premise that you can unlock supply in these markets, then there are 5 key strategies to make this happen: A) Making discovery of licensed providers easier B) Hiring and managing existing providers to maintain quality
11/ Also should include: C) Expanding or augmenting the licensed supply pool. D) Utilizing unlicensed supply. E) Automation and AI. Each one deserves a deep-dive.
12/ There are 125 million Americans who work in the service industry. And we're all consumers of this market. This is a big, big opportunity, and we're excited to be digging in.
13/ Here's the essay so you can read it: https://t.co/fgKbrHTnH5. And shoutout to my co-author @ljin18 who drove most of the writing on this one!

More from Startups

There are some amazing founders and indie hackers that have made 🤯-worthy progress this last year.

The stuff you can do in a year is seriously astounding 👇

👉 @TransistorFM reaching $22k MRR in one year:
https://t.co/BuKmXEeEtH

I was one of their first customers and the progress @mijustin and @jonbuda have made working mostly part-time has been crazy.

Now both are full-time. Follow them on @buildyoursaas

👉 @talk2oneup reaching $10k MRR in one year: https://t.co/SOoGkKA19r

@daviswbaer joined as a co-founder and through many different marketing tactics, pricing changes, and product updates, they've managed to carve out a niche market in a really competitive industry.

👉 @hostifi_net $9k MRR in one year: https://t.co/TknroGZWoK

After getting fired from his full-time job, @_rchase_ embarked on a year focused on building products to replace his salary in a year.

The dude seriously SHIPS and even took investment from @earnestcapital


👉 @ClosetTools $11k MRR WHILE WORKING FULL-TIME AND WITH A FAMILY: https://t.co/pKQ7pFvpZY

With a strong product, continuous improvement, and SEO, @unindie has really been inspirational.

There are no excuses.
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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