09: Many cold starts
Imagine a business that makes it possible for thousands of transactions to happen through multiple sellers without ever owning a single product—think of giants like Amazon, Ebay or Etsy. In 2022, Nautical believed they cracked the code for anyone wanting to build their own marketplace.
The idea was simple yet ambitious: a single platform with built-in finance, logistics and commerce workflows, fully customizable with code. Businesses with a team of developers could build and run a marketplace from scratch by connecting their applications to Nautical. After some early success, we faced challenges in attracting more customers. Our target market was too niche.
By 2024, we had pivoted to a no-code solution, convinced that removing all technical barriers would unleash a wave of successful marketplace entrepreneurs. We poured our efforts into developing user-friendly interfaces so users could connect to their favourite apps and design their online stores—all without coding. Our goal: make launching a marketplace with sellers as quick and easy as possible.
Despite our efforts, marketplaces continued to fail, but not for the reasons we expected.