The Marketplace Calculator

Description
Arteen Arabshahi has invested in early stage marketplaces for more than five years and has recently been asked to put together an assessment tool by ASU W.P. Carey Business School so that their students can use it to stress test potential marketplace opportunities.

This was a great chance for Arteen to codify some of the thinking around how he and those who work at Fika Ventures evaluate marketplace opportunities, reduce it to a framework, and explicitly share it.

In 2015, Arteen's partner TX Zhuo created a great post regarding his 20/20/20 Rule for successful marketplaces. Since 2015 lots has changed, particularly the maturation and growth of companies such as Uber and Airbnb, proving the fact that the marketplace business model is here for the long-run. The marketplace approach has become the status quo as a result of their success and popularity. No longer is it interesting for businesses to "only" connect supply and demand and cut out the middle person. Now marketplace investors want to see more opportunity for quality and control, barriers to entry, supply side optimisation tools and network effects.

Taking all of this in mind, Arteen created this marketplace calculator in the aim of helping to evaluate potential opportunities on more than just one or two variables. He has assigned weights and scores to each question and provided a few examples.

This tool is easy to use, and provides all the questions needed for marketplace evaluation, as well as 4 examples including Uber, Airbnb, Care.com and Homejoy.