MBA2654 Q&A Wednesday: Why Do You Rarely Talk About Marketplace Startups?

Why aren’t marketplace startups talked about more often as go-to business ideas? Frederick sent in this sharp question for today’s episode, and it’s one Omar was excited to tackle. In this lesson, Omar unpacks why marketplaces can be some of the most challenging business models to get off the ground—especially if you're bootstrapping or going solo. From the common pitfalls founders run into to the real stories behind companies like Udemy, Airbnb, Uber, and eBay, you’ll get an honest look at what makes these businesses tough. More importantly, you’ll hear about practical, alternative business models that are easier to launch and far more likely to lead to early success. Curious why Omar doesn’t hype marketplaces—and what he does recommend instead? Hit the play button at the top of this page and get ready for an eye-opening breakdown that could change how you approach your next big idea. Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

  Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn Ads. Cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply. You've probably heard stories like this. Someone built Uber for X or Airbnb for Y. Think Udemy, but better. And I get this question all the time. Why don't you talk about two-sided marketplaces? Why don't you recommend them? Why do you seem to actively avoid the topic?

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Well, it's not because I don't think they're cool. I love them as a consumer. It's because I want you to actually succeed. The truth is marketplace startups are one of the hardest businesses to get off the ground. They're not just hard, they're brutal. Let's break down in today's lesson why I don't recommend them. I'm going to give you real examples from companies that you know, like Udemy, Airbnb, Uber, eBay. All these companies are two-sided marketplaces. But more poorly, I'm going to explain why I don't recommend them, especially for bootstrapped entrepreneurs, people who are self-funded, looking to grow life-changing businesses. First of all, today's question comes from Frederick on Q&A Wednesday. If you've got a question you want to ask here on Q&A Wednesday, just submit it over

• 2:11Speaker 00

  at 100mba.netQ, and you can submit your question there and we'll answer it right here on the show.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.

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  Let's start with what is a two-sided marketplace? Well, a two-sided marketplace is a business that connects two different groups of users, each with different goals, with different behaviors, frankly, with different needs. And you need to consider both of them if you want to make money, because you make money by facilitating the transaction between them. Think about it. Uber connects riders with drivers. Airbnb connects hosts and guests, people with properties and people who want to stay at those properties, right? Udemy connects instructors, course creators, and students. Sounds pretty simple, right? And again, I am a user of all these businesses, right? I love it as a consumer. And conceptually, it seems like a no-brainer, seems like a simple, easy idea.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Build a platform, attract both sides, take a cut, get rich, right? Except it almost never works out that way. The businesses that you see, like the Airbnbs and the Ubers, are the exception to the rule. For every success you see, there are thousands that are in the graveyard. So why do I have a problem with them? Well, let me explain. The first problem with a two-sided marketplace is that you have to build two businesses. With a traditional business, any of the businesses that I mentioned here on the $100 MBA Show, you serve one customer. You build a product, you build a brand, you have an offer, and everything around that is solving a problem for one type of audience member or group of people, right?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  With a marketplace, you're serving two at the same time. You're serving two demographics, two different people, two different marketing strategies, two different onboarding flows, two support systems, and often, two sets of incentives. Let's look at Udemy, for example. This is a marketplace that sells courses online, right? Instructors want to make money and grow their audience. That's one. Set of people I'm serving as the creator of a Udemy type business. The other set are students. Students want high quality, low cost learning on demand. Those are opposing goals, right? Instructors want high prices and high margins. Students want discounts.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  So Udemy has to constantly juggle promotions, the trust between them, content quality, the margins. And they have a ton of issues with both sides being unhappy over the years. You, on the other hand, you don't want stress in year one, right? When you're starting your business, right? When you're starting your entrepreneurial journey. Why tackle the biggest beast? Why do the hardest thing possible? Get some wins under your belt, get some money, right? Build some wealth and then you can think of other options here. The second problem I have with a two-sided marketplace is what I call the chicken and egg trap. We've heard of this before, which came first, the chicken or the egg, right? This is killer, by the way.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  You need supply to attract demand and demand to attract supply. Let me break it down. Let's take Airbnb for example. When they started, no one wanted to list their homes because there were no guests, right? On the platform. And no one wanted to be a guest because no one was listing homes, right? So how did they do it? Literally, the founders and the founding team of Airbnb took professional photos of homes themselves. They wrote the listings for people. They manually onboarded hosts one by one in New York City and San Francisco. And they faked traction just to get it moving, right? They faked what the users would have to do, the hosts would have to do in the future.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  They kind of just forced it to make it happen. Lot of legwork and it could have just fell flat. And people said, no, no, I don't want to do this anymore. That's a ton of hustle before there's any revenue, right? Remember, they're only make money when the transaction happened. They only make money when the host has a guest. That's how they earn a living. So they need to make sure they have a host that is willing, but also has a product or a place that people want to stay in. The guests in order for that transaction to happen. The holidays are the season business owners get pulled in six directions. More calls, more requests, more chances for things to slip through the cracks. Hoping you catch it all isn't a plan. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelt Q U O.

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  That's Q U O dot com slash MBA. Today's episode is sponsored by Upwork. I don't need a script to tell you how much Upwork has helped my business. I've been using Upwork for over a decade and it's the easiest way to find top talent to grow your business. From software development to AI implementation to marketing, design and business operations. You can browse profiles, review past work and get help scoping the role so you can hire with confidence and get started quickly. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork. With over 170,000 freelancers holding five star ratings, you can hire with the confidence that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record.

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• 8:53Speaker 00

  Now, listen, I'm not against hustle, and that works when you're trying to build a billion-dollar company raising VC and funding. And if you're like most people that listen to this podcast that are trying to build profitable, sustainable businesses to own your time and your life, this is the worst possible place to start. Also, you've got to remember that a lot of these marketplaces are fresh ideas in the market, meaning that you have to train a lot of people. And a lot of times, the first in the market doesn't make it. For example, with the Airbnb example I just showed, it took a lot of education for people to feel like it's safe to do this, to actually rent somebody's living room out or their guest room or their whole home to a guest.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Like, it's okay. And the guests have to feel safe that nothing weird's going to happen. So it's hard to penetrate a brand-new segment of the market. Same thing with Uber. You know, there was trust issues. And a good example of this are like MySpace and Friendster. They were the first kind of social media before Facebook kind of became the leader. And no one has a Friendster account anymore because they were kind of too new. People didn't understand how to use this thing. Problem number three I have with two-sided marketplaces: high burn rate, slow traction. Okay? Let's look at Uber, for example. To kickstart supply, they gave drivers phone plans. They gave them cash bonuses. They gave them vehicle loans, right?

• 10:22Speaker 00

  They guaranteed hourly rates. So they guaranteed they would make a certain amount of money every single hour they were driving around the car. Then, they flooded cities with ride coupons, with referral bonuses, with paid ads to get people to use Ubers, right? The actual passengers. At one point, Uber was losing money on every single ride. Uber lost over $30 billion in its lifetime. Okay? I don't like the sound of that. And that's not a typo, guys. $30 billion. Do you know that Uber was not profitable until very recently? Unless you're sitting on millions of investors' dollars, don't try to copy that, okay? Chances are, you're not Uber. And you're smarter than that.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  You can build something that can help you build independent wealth without building a two-sided marketplace. So why do people build marketplaces? Why do they do that? Because they seem scalable. They think if I build a platform, other people do the work. They create the content, offer the service, handle the delivery, and I'll just take a cut. That's the dream, kind of like everybody else is doing the work and I just build a platform. But what you don't see is the enormous uphill battle to get there. Marketplaces are often a phase two or a phase three business, not a phase one business. You need time, you need money, you need a huge initial audience, or some serious inside advantage that others don't have.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Otherwise, you're going to burn out before you ever get traction. So what do you do instead? Build something simpler, build something cleaner, something more profitable. And here's my honest advice if you're just starting out or you're starting your first business. Pick one customer, solve one problem, and charge one price. Just make it super simple on yourself to make things easier to get the ball rolling. Here are some of the more easier business models that actually make money. Service businesses, don't sleep on this. Freelancing, coaching, do it for you work. People want things off their plate. If you can provide a service to solve a problem for them, to fill in a gap, you're going to be profitable.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Next, another option is productized services like editing or design or marketing packages. Courses or digital products are great. Subscriptions or memberships or software businesses. You could start now, you could start generating cash flow and learn how to sell as you go without waiting for network effects to kick in. You want to know how I started before I built a software as a service business? I had several other businesses. I had content businesses, I had courses, I had an e-commerce business, I sold physical goods. I did arbitrage. I had a service-based business, I built websites for people. I had several businesses before I started my software company.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  So I actually understood how to run a business and had some money to invest in my idea a little bit. And also just some expertise and network that I can tap into. And that's when I started Webinar Ninja. I focused on one customer, I solved one problem, and I just focused on how I can make their life easier and make sure I'm solving something that's really painful in their life. And in my case, it was running webinars by themselves as a solopreneur, or author, or speaker, or somebody with a small team. The tech was quite overwhelming, there were a lot of moving parts. Marketing was a whole thing that people didn't want to deal with, and I just made it easier for people to run and market their webinars with my software. Listen, if you listen to today's episode and you're like, you know what? I'm still gonna open up a marketplace.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I'm still gonna do two-sided marketplace despite what Omar said in today's episode. That's fine, as long as you know what you're getting into, right? I'm not here to tell you not to chase your dreams. I'm here to tell you, know what you're getting into. Know what's in store. Know the challenges ahead. Look, marketplaces can work, because they do work, but only when you have access to a supply pool, when you have deeply understood both sides and their needs, like, you know, both sides of the marketplace, and you're ready for years of unprofitable hustle, right? If you are ready to do that, great. But know that you need to have a lot of things on your side, because most people, despite all this, still fail.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  So if you're attempting to launch Uber for whatever, stop and ask, is that what I want to be doing every day for the next five years? And think of what you're gonna do every single day. Your day-to-day tasks, well, how are you gonna wake up? How are you gonna show up? What are you gonna do? Because it's gonna be you in the beginning answering customer emails and trying to get both sides to show up and convincing investors that, hey, this is a great idea. And you're struggling to generate revenue, because, hey, the platform sits on this seesaw of I gotta make sure these people are happy and these people are happy. If you want my advice, start with something that allows you to build wealth that you can own, that you can control, that you can grow without burning out or begging strangers to list their services. But if you still want to do it, go ahead.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  But don't tell me that Uncle Omar did not warn you, okay?

• 15:35Speaker 00

  I'm here to support you in any way possible. If you have a question, if you have something you're struggling with, send me your question over at 100mba.net/ q and we'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday, just like we did today. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

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