How To Grow A Marketplace

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The following guest post is by Dinesh Thiru, Vice President, Marketing, Udemy, a marketplace for online courses, with over 600,000 students and 6,000 courses worldwide.
There are many different types of businesses, but marketplaces are the hardest to get off the ground. Entrepreneurs taking on this model have embroiled themselves in a classic “chicken & egg” problem with marketplace supply and demand. You need chickens to get eggs. But you also need eggs to get chickens.

Dinesh Thiru, VP marketing, Udemy

So, why build a marketplace and take on such a tough problem?
You launch a marketplace if you believe your potential market is huge and that your massive “supply” will create an unfair advantage in your market. This is why Udemy is a marketplace — because the learning market is huge (literally hundreds of billions of dollars) and we believe the way to truly democratize education is to empower the millions of experts around the world to teach online.
If we do this, we’ll be able to deliver incredible value to our students. No matter what they want to learn, they’ll be able to learn it on Udemy. This will be our “unfair” advantage.
How are we building this marketplace?
Start with supply-side tactics to get your “chickens”:

md. Shane Haider
pgdm 2nd sem