YOUNGSTOWN BUSINESS INCUBATOR

What You Need to Know Before Starting a Platform Business

We’re in an era that, thanks to digital technologies, is highly conducive to platform businesses — and to their existing on a greater scale than in the past.

MIT Sloan wrote an article on how to start up your own platform business.

“There’s a great deal of enthusiasm about platform strategies these days. Entrepreneurs pitch their startups as the next Uber, the next Facebook, or the next Airbnb, while executives in established companies are retooling their strategies around platforms to drive growth and compete digitally.

But creating a successful platform business is not easy, as economists Richard Schmalensee and David S. Evans will tell you. Schmalensee and Evans have studied multisided platforms — in other words, businesses that create value by connecting two or more sets of participants via a physical or virtual platform — for more than a decade. Their most recent book for executives, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2016.”

Read the full article here.