Do Your Own Thing vs Marketplaces

Lots of ideas sound like this – construct a platform where you are able to do your thing – create your intelligent agent, run an auction, open a store, or offer your professional service. With one important distinction, you are responsible for promoting your own thing. The platform is not Amazon or eBay for goods, or Upwork for services.

Marketplaces, in contrast, have discovery built in. Buyers go to the marketplace and see all the goods and services from all the vendors. It is very difficult to start a new marketplace because you have to simultaneously bootstrap both supply and demand.

But getting vendors to use a platform where they do their own thing, with no discovery, means the vendors need their own distribution. They have to promote their store. Shopify does just that. You get a store, but you do the promotion.

Building a platform where you do your own thing requires finding an audience of vendors. So it is a B2B challenge.

Cracking such a challenge is possible in very specific situations. I am trying to understand these situations.

This is an open-ended research project with the goal of coming up with new startup ideas.