No-code is driving the rise of the niche service marketplace
Hi, I just posted an article on "The rise of the niche service marketplace", and why its taken so long to take off. In it, I outline all the ways service marketplaces are different from their product counterparts.
Compared to product marketplaces, in service marketplaces the buying process is neither simple, nor consistent across purchases. Trust and quality are much more difficult to verify ahead of time. You can't ship a service (which typically requires a human being's direct input if not presence) in a box. They're difficult to roll-up in the way Amazon managed to begin selling in the books industry, and now the potted plants, and grocery items industry.
Let me know what you think, and if there are any service marketplaces out there that we could feature in some way!
I agree with the general thesis of the article. I'm finally looking to jump in a build a niche marketplace or two of my own. To reply to the prior comment, the barriers to entry are now so low it's much easier to make attempts, even if the chicken and egg problem is tough.
Question: What are the best No-Code/ish platforms out there beyond Sharetribe?
At AirDev, we use almost exclusively Bubble for all of our builds. It's more visual programming language than platform, but we also have a framework that sits on top of it called Canvas that massively speeds up the development process. We've seen other people use Canvas to build their own marketplaces, so maybe worth exploring?
Outside of that, I feel like there's not much between Sharetribe, and going with a fully custom, heavily coded build.
I feel your post is a little too abstract for me to understand.
A niche service marketplace is suddenly more affordable to launch because of no-code? How does it solve the chicken or the egg issue?
I think you suggest that legal and medical services are shifting online. True. But is it due to no-code?
Or are you saying a specific niche of legal services will now be unlocked due to no-code, in other words, a lawyer can produce this service and wouldn't be able to outside no-code? That, I think, is happening. There are more lawyers making apps, even non-lawyers, to fight parking tickets using AI.
But I don't think that's a marketplace.
I'm a lawyer and I'm interested in no-code products that can help me scale my practice and develop adjacent businesses.
Totally agree that things shifting online is a trend that is happening and will continue regardless of what happens in the no-code space!
No-code doesn't automatically circumvent the chicken-and-egg problem at all. The biggest benefit no-code provides is that it lets founders tackle the problem even more explicitly. I wrote a piece that goes even more in-depth on this actually.
I think that even when we're looking to build marketplaces without code, the "building marketplaces" part is always more important than the "without code" part.
And we're also seeing true marketplaces pop up in law specifically that try to entirely circumvent the firm model to connect lawyers directly to clients.
Re: no-code tools for lawyers, have you seen community.lawyer? Have met the founder and they're really trying to create a solid platform that takes advantage of a number of different no-code tools to empower lawyers. In this case it's focused more on the increasing the efficiency of a single lawyer than building a marketplace, but thought it might be worth checking out!
In what ways would you want to scale your practice? I don't see how as a lawyer you can take on more clients than those in your region since lawyers are tied to bars right?