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The Next 10 Years Will Be About “Market Networks” for Entrepreneurs
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Market networks are a relatively new concept that combines the best of social media networks and niche marketplaces. They are designed to facilitate transactions between professionals and businesses, making it easier for them to connect, communicate, and collaborate.
Market networks are important because they provide a platform for professionals to build their reputation, showcase their skills, and find new opportunities. They also help businesses to find the right talent, build relationships with customers, and grow their brand.
In today’s competitive market, responsiveness to customer or supplier demand is often a decisive factor in the success of an organization. The network is considered one of the most critical resources in an organization, both in the private and public sectors.
In the last decade, the tech industry has obsessed over on-demand labor marketplaces for quick transactions of simple services. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Mechanical Turk, Thumbtack, DoorDash and many others made it efficient to buy simple services whose quality is judged objectively. Their success was based on commodifying the people on both sides of the marketplace.
However, the highest value services – like event planning and home remodels — are neither simple nor objectively judged. They are more involved and longer term. Market networks are designed for these.
With complex services, each client is unique and the professional they get matters. Would you hand over your wedding to just anyone? Your home remodel? The people on both sides of those equations are not interchangeable like they are with Lyft or Uber. Each person brings unique opinions, expertise, and relationships to the transaction. A market network is designed to acknowledge that as a core tenet and provide a solution.
For most complex services, multiple professionals collaborate among themselves—and with a client—over a period of time. The SaaS at the center of market networks focuses the action on a project that can take days or years to complete.
Pleasing profiles with information unique to their context give the people involved a reason to come back and interact here. It captures part of their identity better than elsewhere on the internet.
Market networks bring a career’s worth of professional connections online and make them more useful. For years, social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook have helped built long-term relationships. However, until market networks, they hadn’t been used for commerce and transactions.
In these industries, referrals are gold, for both client and service professional. The market network software is designed to make referrals simple and more frequent.
By putting the network of professionals and clients into software, the market network increases transaction velocity for everyone. It increases the close rate on proposals and speeds up payment. The software also increases customer satisfaction scores, reduces miscommunication, and makes the work pleasing and beautiful. Never underestimate pleasing and beautiful.
First we had communication networks like telephones and email. Then we had social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Now we have market networks like Markethive ( First Network on Blockchain), HoneyBook, AngelList, DotLoop, and Houzz.
You can imagine a market network for every industry where professionals are not interchangeable: crypto, affiliate marketing, law, travel, residential real estate, commercial real estate, media production, architecture, investment banking, interior design, personal finance, commercial construction, residential construction, consulting, and more. Each market network will have different attributes that make it work in each vertical, but the principles will remain the same.
Over time, nearly all independent professionals and their clients will conduct business through the market network of their industry. We’re just seeing the beginning of it now.
Market networks will have a massive positive impact on how millions of people work and live, and how hundreds of millions of people buy better services.
I hope more entrepreneurs will set their sights on building these businesses. It’s time. They are hard products to get right, but the payoff is potentially massive.
A decentralized marketplace allows for true peer-to-peer transactions without centralized authorities taking their fees. This is made possible through blockchain technology and smart contracts. We no longer need the trusted third party verifying sellers and ensuring payments.
To be successful in online branding and operating a business in the ever-expanding internet world, you must maintain your profile in many networks, social and market. It’s difficult to effortlessly scale your reputation from one network to a different one. They are pretty much isolated from each other and they can’t communicate with each other, nor do they really want to because they generally belong to someone. And it so happens that “someone” is never the community that brings value to the platform. It’s not easy for a centralized market network to diversify among service providing platforms and it takes a lot of effort to build and maintain individual profiles that you can only use in an isolated network.
What if your online identity always belonged to you, not a service or platform? And also, the reputation of your branding was maintained by the network and that network also belonged to you? In other words, a decentralized reputation that would enable you to plug into any other centralized network. You see, when your reputation is decentralized, the entire digital space becomes your network.
Blockchain is the ultimate framework or infra-structure tool that gives individuals true ownership of their digital selfhood and reputation. It creates self-sovereignty.
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Decentralization has many features that are beneficial for industries and users around the world. Reduced fees, increased efficiencies, removal of biased agendas and tiers of corruption and greed.
There have been companies like Airbnb and Uber that introduced a new era allowing people to rent out and monetize items. Or eBay and Etsy allowed people to sell products online and Upwork and Fiverr helped freelancers to sell their services. At this stage, these companies are all centralized and very linear with no collaboration between them.
The traditional social media platforms are losing their edge, and their users have taken a massive beating. While some have given up on their social media world completely because it’s affecting their psychological well-being, some have become very disappointed with the fact that the benefit of their work was being passed onto the site more than them or their hard work has been deleted by centralized authorities due to hidden agendas.
If this wasn’t enough, user data, which is meant to be confidential, is being made available in the open market, with governments, advertising companies and more having access to it. This has made users apprehensive about sharing personal details of their lives.
Blockchain is going to transform the user experience in social media networking. These are important factors like the users’ information is encrypted on the blockchain network, so the privacy of data is maintained. Also, a platform can offer monetary compensation and loyalty programs for any and all activity performed by the user. Imagine producing viral content on the platform and getting paid for it? This does not happen on traditional social media, fast becoming a product of drama, agendas, and antiquity.
There are upcoming platforms that are classed as social media on the blockchain whereby you can monetize your blogs, some even have a messaging app integrated, but it stops there. Imagine a complete Market Network as described above that is decentralized, pluggable, and portable which are key components and that have the capabilities to have your marketing, blogging, Storefronts, in fact, all your branding goes viral across all platforms in the internet space?
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Markethive is a social marketplace, digital media platform for entrepreneurs that have the combined power of Facebook/LinkedIn, Marketo/Hubspot and Amazon/eBay along with Crypto News Sites like Cointelegraph/Bitcoin.com. Delivering a dynamic social network, integrated with Inbound Marketing (SAAS), numerous commerce platforms, storefronts coupled with augmented reality, and multiple traffic portals, built on the blockchain.
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About: Andries vanTonder (Over 40 years self-employed)
He is a Serial Entrepreneur, an Enthusiastic supporter of Blockchain Technology and a Cryptocurrency Investor
Find me at my Markethive Profile Page | My Twitter Account | My Instagram Acount | and my Facebook Profile.
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