by Mike Williams

How to go from idea to live marketplace MVP with no software development skills ?️?

Online marketplaces such as Airbnb, Turo, Hipcamp, Grailed, and others have shown that sharing economies can unlock valuable assets and in turn create massive marketplace businesses. But marketplaces have typically been very hard to build and launch in the past.

In this post, I’ll take you step-by-step through taking your marketplace idea to MVP using a marketplace platform solution. We’ll remove some of the constraints faced when looking to build and launch a marketplace if you don’t having coding skills.

Please note that this is also a video formatted post. I’ve found that the best way to be as specific as possible is by directly screen sharing the entire process from start to finish and using a real example.

Table Of Contents:

• Introduction
• Part 1: Basic marketplace setup
• Part 2: Marketplace configuration specific to your concept and marketplace requirements
• Part 3: Final marketplace configuration, prep for external testing, and launch!
• Resources: Other Sharetribe Marketplace Examples

Introduction

Before we get started, it’s worth mentioning that there are many options to choose when picking the right way (software platform solution, tech stack, tools, etc) and approach to building your marketplace. There are also many considerations, which can also be specific to you and your marketplace concept.

For the sake of keeping this generally applicable to those looking to take their idea to marketplace MVP without coding, I’ll be using Sharetribe’s turnkey marketplace platform solution, which they call Sharetribe GO. I consider this to be a great way to take an idea to marketplace MVP without coding or software development skills needed.

I’ve used Sharetribe and their various marketplace solutions for a few years, and have extensive experience working with it. I’ve even customized it to meet my specific marketplace needs as marketplaces I’ve built and launched have scaled (specifically Studiotime).

You can read more on the story of how I built and launched Studiotime in an evening here. It’s now the largest online marketplace for booking music studios in the world and it’s in 35+ countries!

Part 1: Signing up for Sharetribe and basic marketplace setup

As mentioned above, we’ll be using Sharetribe GO, which is their hosted marketplace platform. This is a turnkey marketplace solution and accounts for product and goods, services, spaces, and other marketplace types.

Using the video below, we’ll go ahead and walk through the process of signup (here), to setting up our demo marketplace for renting music studios.

Part 2: Marketplace configuration specific to your concept and marketplace requirements

Part 3: Final marketplace configuration, prep for external testing, and launch!

Resources: Other Sharetribe Marketplace MVP Examples

Hopefully you found this guide and all of the resources shared above useful! If you have any specific questions when building your own marketplace, you send them to me on Twitter (I’m @Yoroomie), where I’m quick to reply.

You can also check out my YouTube channel with more tutorials, how-to videos, and insights into building, launching, and scaling marketplaces.