How can scalability help you develop your marketplace?
When you're developing a marketplace, it's important to think about scalability first and foremost. Your marketplace must respond to a market need at a given moment in time, and having a solution that doesn't meet that need will probably be synonymous with difficulties or even failure. You need to imagine and choose a solution that can adapt quickly and effectively to the constraints of your environment.
What do we mean by scalability?
Let's start with the definition of scalability. It refers to a product's ability to scale up, increasing its performance and functionality in line with market demand. In high-demand markets, it's not always easy to predict and anticipate, and it's essential to be able to adapt functionality quickly to meet demand. In this sense, the scalability of your project is essential.
In the context of a marketplace, scalability is essential, because the market is growing fast, demand is constantly evolving and needs change almost from week to week. Although anticipation must be a priority in your business, you need to be able to constantly adapt the tool you are going to use and therefore be scalable, almost ad infinitum. Don't forget that markets are constantly evolving, both structurally and legally!
Scalability on a marketplace comes into play at various levels. Firstly, in terms of structure and performance, the tool must be able to keep up with your changes, i.e. :
- traffic
- storage
- security.
In terms of options and modules, scalability is also essential, because depending on the constraints, specific tools may need to be developed and implemented that were not necessarily envisaged from the outset. From a legal point of view, operators are subject to ever-increasing constraints, and the marketplace must be able to adapt to meet these standards.
3 tips to ensure the scalability of your marketplace
Know what the market wants
Creating a marketplace is a challenge, and the first instinct is to want to go to market with a fully developed solution, incorporating dozens of functions, even before you have presented the concept to the market. Many customers and prospects want to offer a complete solution, which is understandable.
However, you need to be careful, because your idea, however good it may be, may not be what your market is looking for. You need to test your platform in the field before you start developing features. Obviously, I'm not talking about essential functionalities, but those that can be deployed when growth levels are reached.
So you need to ask yourself two questions before getting started:
- What is the primary need that my idea meets?
- What functionalities should be envisaged, and within what timescale?
Based on this premise, it's a good idea to set objectives and put in place all the tools and KPIs that will enable you to understand the needs and translate them into reality. You need to be in constant contact with your customers and facilitate all the processes involved in understanding, analysing and enabling them to pass on information to you.
To understand market expectations, anticipate them and put them in place, you need to gather requirements, imagine them, build them and then implement them.
Launch an MVP, even if it's incomplete
Once your primary needs have been clarified, it's easier to launch your MVP (Minimum Viable Product). With this first version, which could be called a beta version, you will already have a feel for the expectations of the sector, the unidentified needs and the real constraints of all the players.
This MVP will then enable you to exploit your idea to the full, but above all to adapt it. By adopting this approach, you will position yourself as a key player who understands, analyses and is capable of putting in place the necessary tools.
Rely on the agile method
Agility will be your strength. You will be able to provide a strong response to a problem identified in your MVP. You might not have imagined this problem at the outset. That's when you'll be able to create your functionality exactly as it needs to be and not as you had in mind at the outset.
Another advantage of sticking to the Agile method is that you can set yourself development milestones and fund developments in line with these. In my experience, between 10 and 30% of the project evolves directly at launch, despite prior anticipation and market research.
How can the scalability of your tools help you develop your marketplace?
The choice of your solution is absolutely essential. Generally speaking, there are two solutions available to you:
- a proprietary solution or
- a SaaS solution.
A proprietary solution, like a SaaS solution, is not necessarily scalable. A fortiori, in SaaS mode, the publisher of the solution may not be able to make the developments you might need. It's not easy to be scalable and modular in a common block, especially if the tool wasn't designed that way.
In proprietary mode, you also need to ensure that the very structure of your project is scalable. It's not uncommon to see projects stalled or having to be rebuilt because the technology, infrastructure and code are unable to adapt.
The project must not adapt to the solution, but the solution must adapt to the project!
With this in mind, Medialeads has built a solution that clearly meets this need for scalability. The very heart of our tools is scalability. Whatever your project or idea, we work in the same way, imagining in advance all the tools needed for the MVP and the likely developments. We then create a core that will be scalable and able to meet your needs.
Medialeads is now in a position to create scalable proprietary solutions that are totally bespoke, with specific and unique methods. Our SaaS solution also meets this fundamental need, so that each project, even if it is contained within our solution, will be scalable and not limited by code.
In conclusion, whatever your strategic approach, you need to anticipate requirements in terms of solutions and information retrieval. Bear in mind that your platform will be constantly evolving, so the choice of partner becomes a major issue, as does understanding how to guarantee efficient scalability.
Article translated from French