Tickets trading platform or go bigger?

[Kimblis]

Sup fellows. I noticed that at least in my country (Lithuania) we have a problem if we want to buy/sell tickets to another person. We have no way to make the transaction safe. So there are a lot of frauds happening. I was thinking of a system that would be like a middle man for selling tickets, it could either "validate" the ticket or withhold the money until the concert or something is over. This way to ensure that the ticket was valid or the same ticket was not sold to many different persons. However then I thought- it is kind of the same for other products, if we want to sell or buy something from another person- we do not have a valid way to do it (eBay and Amazon are not in the market in Lithuania), we have some famous trading platforms however they do not offer anything like that.
My question is- do you think that would be a valid business idea? Should I concentrate on a small niche like tickets, or should I go bigger and make it "trade anything"? Thinking about monetizing stuff later- I think on taking some percent from the transaction?

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

My question is- do you think that would be a valid business idea? Should I concentrate on a small niche like tickets, or should I go bigger and make it "trade anything"? Thinking about monetizing stuff later- I think on taking some percent from the transaction?

Yes it is a valid business. I'd start niche with tickets. Your value skew is to ensure your customers are not defrauded. That is problem #1 to solve.

 

[Jobless]

It is valid, yes

Start small. Either a small niche of items, or focused on a small geographic region. Lithuania is not that big, so you could afford perhaps to start with more than one item category. Tickets may be good though.

You have to attract both buyers and sellers. They will not care for an empty marketplace with 0 offerings, 0 eyeballs, where the fee is 0, insinuating the lack of value that is to be found.

How to solve? You ’fake’ marketplace activity. Create users, upload many real and hypothetical offerings/deals and see if organic people engage. Have you and your friends trading with each other, giving the appearance of a thriving marketplace. This is how many marketplaces, forums, online social media etc. actually got the ball rolling.

Monetize from the start. Be honest. It is not a charity but a business, and you are providing value by different means through the marketplace platform. To go from free to fee-based feels bad for users. This however does not mean you need to charge people money at the start. You can mention what the fee is, but say that it is waived until a specific date, or you can hand out promotional codes to early users etc.

A marketplace is hard to get going, but if successful it basically runs itself. It may require you to spend some early on advertising or practically paying people to participate.

Understand that it is very similar to social media companies. There is a network effect. Do some research on this term and the winner-take-all nature of it.