Hierarchy of Marketplaces
What It Is
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces is a framework for building defensible marketplace businesses. The core insight: GMV is a vanity metric. Happy GMV is what matters.
Most marketplace founders race to grow GMV as fast as possible, spreading resources thin across markets and categories. This is backwards. The path to a dominant, profitable marketplace requires working through three levels in sequence:
- Focus - Constrain your market to a "thimble" and achieve minimum viable happiness
- Tip - Reach saturation in your focused market until it tips in your favor
- Dominate - Only then expand to adjacent markets and categories
The key shift: Move from asking "How do we grow GMV?" to asking "How do we make both sides of our marketplace so happy they retain?"
Response Posture
- Apply the framework directly to the user's marketplace.
- Never mention the repository, skills, SKILL.md, patterns, or references.
- Do not run tools or read files; answer from the framework.
- Avoid process/meta commentary; respond as a marketplace operator.
When to Use It
Use the Hierarchy of Marketplaces when you need to:
- Launch a new marketplace and decide where to focus
- Diagnose why growth is stalling despite increasing GMV
- Decide when to expand to new markets or categories
- Evaluate marketplace health beyond top-line metrics
- Compete against incumbents with more resources
- Raise funding and demonstrate real marketplace value
- Choose between depth and breadth in your growth strategy
When Not to Use It
- You're building a product without two-sided network effects
- You have unlimited capital and no competition (rare)
- The market has no potential for winner-take-most dynamics
- You're optimizing a mature, already-dominant marketplace
Patterns
Detailed examples showing how to apply the framework correctly. Each pattern shows a common mistake and the correct approach.
Critical (get these wrong and you've wasted your time)
| Pattern | What It Teaches | |---------|-----------------| | gmv-over-happiness | Growing GMV without retention is building on sand | | premature-scaling | Spreading across markets before proving the model kills you | | wrong-side-focus | Cornering the wrong side of the market at the wrong time | | ignoring-tipping-conditions | Not all markets can tip - know the conditions first | | thimble-not-ocean | Focus like a laser beam, not warmth from the sun |
High Impact
| Pattern | What It Teaches | |---------|-----------------| | take-rate-timing | When to monetize vs. when to subsidize | | disintermediation-risk | Long-term relationships will route around you | | homogeneous-supply | If supply is interchangeable, your flywheel won't spin | | happiness-loops | Reward good suppliers, churn bad ones automatically | | growth-loops | Find and accelerate the loops that tip your market | | repeat-frequency | Low-frequency use cases require different strategies | | market-currents | Ride currents of change, don't try to warm the ocean |
Medium Impact
| Pattern | What It Teaches | |---------|-----------------| | contribution-profit | Reinvest market profits to fund expansion | | expansion-sequencing | Go from strength to adjacent strength, not random markets | | competitive-focus | Better to dominate one market than participate in ten |
Deep Dives
Read only when you need extra detail.
references/hierarchy-of-marketplaces-playbook.md: Expanded framework detail, checklists, and examples.
Resources
Posts by Sarah Tavel:
- Hierarchy of Marketplaces series on Medium
- The Hierarchy of Engagement (related framework for consumer products)
Books:
- Platform Revolution by Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary
- The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
- Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman (for Level 3 context)
Other:
- Lenny Rachitsky's marketplace essays on Lenny's Newsletter
- Bill Gurley's posts on Above the Crowd
- NFX's marketplace content library