A directory is not a marketplace.
Early marketplace playbooks focused on aggregation: bring supply into one place, attract demand, and take a fee when the two sides meet. That still works in some categories. In many others, discovery is no longer the hard part.
The hard part is making the transaction safe, fast, compliant, financeable, or operationally possible. That is the plus.
The plus earns the network.
Marketplace+ is not software taped onto a marketplace for a better revenue multiple. The product should remove the friction that prevented the market from working in the first place.
What the plus can be.
Why now is unusually interesting.
AI lowers the cost of serving narrow markets. Vertical software has digitized workflows that used to be invisible. Payments and embedded finance are easier to build. Founders can now start with a useful single-player product, earn distribution, and turn the data and relationships inside that product into a marketplace.
The software becomes the wedge. The network becomes the outcome.
How Yonder looks at Marketplace+.
- Does the product make the transaction meaningfully better?
- Does product usage create a path to proprietary supply or demand?
- Does the marketplace improve the software, or are they two unrelated products?
- Does each transaction produce data that improves pricing, trust, or matching?
- Can the company start narrow enough to build density?
Building the plus?