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Some of the world’s most valuable tech companies are marketplaces: Uber, Airbnb, Eventbrite, Upwork and others.

In the most basic form, a marketplace is a platform that connects supply (sellers) and demand (buyers). It can range from basic bazaars to complex market networks like AngelList.

Marketplace business models can be very profitable since they don’t (normally) own any supply or products and take some form of rent or transaction cut from its participants. As a result, they are very efficient and scalable but also one of the most complex to kick-off.

Below, I've summarised top essays from the world’s leading marketplace experts. This summary is my attempt at distilling their very thoughtful essays into a paragraph or two.

Kobe Bryant used very simple drills during his training, he was focusing on the basics. Once asked, why is he working on the basics, he’s the best player in the world. His response was that he is the best player in the world because he never bores of the basics.

Basics are simple, but not easy. Just look at FC Barcelona’s golden age.

In science, we refer to basics as first principles, the fundamentals that everything else is built upon. Elon Musk famously talks about how he uses first principles in his thinking. So does Naval Ravikant and many others.

Marketing, too, can be distilled to fundamentals and first principles that you can use to build or improve any marketing strategy, regardless of channel or medium that you use.

Uber is one of the strongest operational companies out there that has cracked how to scale marketplace business. Their secret was simple - a launch playbook and use 'health' metrics to monitor supply and demand match.

To remain valuable in our economy you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. Talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy:

• The ability to quickly master hard things;
• The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

There’s a premium to being the best.

These days everything competes for our attention. If we want our opinions to be heard we need to build high impact arguments.

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micro-markets, but each micro-market still has ‘a best’.

In a free market, we reward the exceptional. The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.

So while it’s more important than ever to be the best in the world, it’s also easier—if you pick the right thing and do it all the way. More places to win, and the stakes are higher, too.

To become the best you will need to go through ‘the dip’.

SEO is one of the 3 main highways to build a sustainable growth machine that can get you to $100m+ in ARR, besides paid marketing and virality.

If I could write an article that would replace the Director of SEO, this would be it.

I will show you how successful companies like Upwork, Thumbtack, Strava, Ahrefs and others have built their businesses using SEO.

I will outline two major strategies that can morph into a powerful growth engine for your business.