15 Mistakes That Can Kill a Local Services Marketplace
Sushmeet Setia
Conclusion None of these fifteen mistakes are exotic. Most are well documented, and most are avoidable with the right infrastructure in place before launch, not after the first serious incident, the first funding crunch, or the first no-show that costs a customer for good. What …
How to Solve the Chicken-and-Egg Problem in Food Delivery
Conclusion The chicken-and-egg problem in food delivery isn’t solved by a clever trick or a bigger ad budget. It’s solved by sequencing: pick the hardest side, or shortcut it with an existing asset, go narrow, give one side a reason to join alone, and subsidize …
ShortMax Business Model – Everything a Founder Needs to Know
A few years ago, vertical dramas were a niche format. Today, they’re one of the fastest-growing categories in mobile entertainment, attracting millions of viewers who prefer quick, mobile-first storytelling over traditional TV formats. Few platforms have grown as quickly as ShortMax. Its combination of cliffhanger …
Airbnb Wants to Be the Amazon of Services: How to Build One
Brian Chesky didn’t call it a “pivot.” He called it inevitable. During a recent CNBC interview, Airbnb’s CEO said the company could eventually support “dozens, possibly even hundreds of categories,” describing his vision of building “an Amazon for services” focused on traveling and living. This …
How to Build a Recommendation System Without Millions of Videos
Building a recommendation system for a short-video app, social media app, or creator platform doesn’t require millions of videos or a massive AI team. Yet most guides focus on enterprise-scale architectures built for platforms like TikTok and YouTube, making them impractical for startups. The real …
Why Bigo Live Keeps Growing While Streaming Apps Decline
Conclusion Bigo Live keeps growing because it has built more than streaming technology. It has created a real-time marketplace in which creators receive income and recognition, viewers receive participation and status, agencies support creator supply, algorithms distribute attention, and virtual gifts convert interaction into …
Will Netflix Ever Launch a Vertical Drama Experience?
Netflix has spent two decades training audiences to sit back, scroll a horizontal grid, and commit to an hour of television. Meanwhile, a new generation of apps has trained a different kind of viewer: one who holds the phone vertically, taps to unlock the next …
ReelShort vs DramaBox: UX Patterns That Keep Users Watching
Vertical micro-drama apps follow a familiar formula of one- to three-minute episodes, cliffhanger endings, and monetization through coins or subscriptions. What separates the leading platforms is not the content alone but the user experience. Every interaction, from onboarding and content discovery to video playback and …
Choosing the Right Creator Niche Before Building Your Platform
Choosing the right creator niche is one of the most important decisions before building a creator subscription platform. Your niche determines the features you need, your payment processing options, content moderation requirements, target audience, and overall development costs. Whether you’re targeting fitness coaches, educators, musicians, …
7 Markets Where an InDriver Clone Has Better Chances Than Uber
Uber built its empire on upfront pricing and algorithmic matching. InDrive took the opposite approach, letting riders and drivers haggle over fares directly, and by February 2026 had grown to over 400 million app downloads across 1,065 cities in 48 countries, ranking as the world’s …
