You’re Not Building a Marketplace
Most marketplaces don’t fail because of a lack of demand.
They fail because they confuse aggregation with adoption.
That early rush—spinning up supply in a bunch of cities, categories, or personas—can look like traction. You’ve got SKUs. Supply is live. Maybe even a few bookings. But that doesn’t mean you’ve built a marketplace.
What you’ve built is a directory.
Here’s the litmus test, pulled from Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore:
“A market is a set of actual customers for a given set of products or services who have a common set of needs or wants and who reference each other when making buying decisions.”
That last part—they reference each other—is the difference between a business that compounds and one that stalls.
If your customers don’t reference each other, you don’t have one market. You have a collection of disconnected micro-markets, each requiring its own playbook, messaging, and supply strategy. And that means:
No social proof loops
No flywheel from word-of-mouth
No density → no liquidity
No compounding CAC efficiency
All the benefits that make marketplaces beautiful? Gone.
The D-Day Mistake
Moore’s D-Day analogy is dead-on: when you’re crossing the chasm, you don’t storm every beach at once. You pick one. You pour every ounce of focus and firepower into it. You win that wedge. Then, and only then, do you expand.
But here’s what happens in practice:
You go wide across every persona or use case before you’ve won one.
You tailor your onboarding, your experience, your pricing… to everyone.
You don’t create a 10x experience for anyone.
And the result? Mediocre CACs. Weak retention. Supply churn. The very things you built your marketplace to solve.
The Real Growth Playbook
The irony is that trying to grow too fast is often what keeps you small.
The path to scalable, defensible growth isn’t in horizontal expansion—it’s in wedge dominance.
Here’s the play:
Pick a micro-market where your customers reference each other (e.g., NYC tennis parents, not "people who want tennis lessons").
Tailor every element of your platform to them: onboarding, messaging, pricing, supply, and UX.
Saturate the wedge until the experience is undeniably better than any alternative.
Expand adjacently using the network density, testimonials, and operational learnings from your wedge.
We don’t talk about this enough. Everyone wants to build the next Airbnb. But Airbnb didn’t start as “a place to stay.” It started with broke design kids trying to make rent during a conference. That’s a wedge.
One Last Thought
You’re not building a "marketplace."
You’re building a market.
And it better reference itself—or you’re fighting an uphill battle with no compounding leverage.