I spent ~$250 building an extended version of the "Marketplace 100 index"

About two months ago, a16z shared this post - The a16z Marketplace 100. What made that post so interesting to me is that it aligns very well with SaaSHub. Moreover, what makes the index valuable and credible is that it is based on real transactions data in the US (provided by Second Measure). In essence, some of the listed products may not be known to you or me; however, being part of the index means a lot of people are transacting through them. And that is a very objective way to order the list.

Yet, there was something I didn’t like about that index. It was presented as a simple image. You can’t easily click and view a product, neither search for anything. Then I thought - why don’t I use that index and prepare a similar list on SaaSHub. It will be much more dynamic, searchable and a bit more useful with the inclusion of relevant alternatives. In order to make it work, however, I had to make some minor modifications on SaaSHub (easy) and go through the whole list of products and organise them. Assign indexes, improve product details (categories, features, descriptions, etc.) as well as finding articles that include every single product and their alternatives (manually). These articles are then used to compile the lists with competitors. That’s a lot of manual work. I started doing that myself, but after a week or two, there was not much progress. I could spend an hour or two a day, but it wasn’t going as fast as I wanted. And I wasn’t spending my time in the most efficient way. Then I decided it’s time to hire a VA (virtual assistant) to help me out with that.

I found a VA on Upwork. She was spending 1h a day for a few weeks to go through the whole list. The most time-consuming part was finding and collecting articles that mention and list competitors of the top 100 products, and then manually extracting the names of all alternatives. Nevertheless, all of that finished last week, and we have the Marketplace 100 index online on SaaSHub now. To be honest, I had a few more ideas on how to improve it that didn’t make it online. For example, filtering by year of release or by headquarters. That could be interesting to some people. Should the index acquire any popularity, I may go on and add those filters.

The big question I asked myself was - was it worth it spending the money (about ~$250), time and energy to build this on SaaSHub. I definitely think so.

First, the list itself might be interesting to some people and may help me attract some new publicity and social media traffic to SH. For example, it reached the “hot” section of /r/Tech pretty quickly (a sub-reddit of 307k members), and got a few likes on twitter.

Second, it spurred me to hire a Virtual Assistant and forced me to build a new authorisation layer with policies as part of SaaSHub, so that I can give the right access to the VA. I was a bit lucky in this phase, as I happened to find an extremely skilful and responsible person that needed minimal guidance. What is more, I decided to work with the same VA on an ongoing 1h/day contract. And that is enough to cover all regular maintenance and support tasks of SaaSHub, giving me more time and opportunity to develop the platform further.

Third, even if one person decides to promote their product on SaaSHub with a featured listing, because of stumbling upon the "Marketplace 100 Index", it will be a positive ROI.

So yes, I regard the Marketplace 100 on SaaSHub as a successful side project that helped me find a great person to work with on the long run. And, as a byproduct, we have this new page that many will deem useful.

If you are hustling on your side-project and are making any money out of it, I would highly recommend considering a VA and delegating some of the daily support and maintenance tasks.