UX for Business

A Marketplace

Complex Products and Services Are More Than the Sum of Their Features

Starting now, we’re going to move beyond the “features perspective” on a product. By zooming out a little, we can consider the big, fundamental problems in a variety of different business models.

As our first “simple, but complex” business model, let’s look at a marketplace.

Marketplaces, as a concept, are just places where two (or more) groups of people come together because they need each other. The classic case is a marketplace for buyers and sellers, like Airbnb or Tinder or Upwork. In those cases, there are two sides: people offering and renting rooms, looking for “romantic” partners, or offering and hiring freelance services.

The fundamental problem of a marketplace is to get enough people on both sides to find each other. That’s it! It’s a matchmaking problem! But as easy as that might sound, marketplaces are notoriously difficult to grow.

I will stick to a two-sided marketplace here. The principles are essentially the same if you add more groups but get exponentially more complicated to describe as a design problem.

Supply and Demand as Products

An economist might describe a marketplace ...