"Before we examine these vectors, it’s important to understand there is no one dominant business model, and the larger companies grow, the more likely they are to sequence to new or additional models over time."

"If a business is a marketplace, it is selling incremental demand to customers as its primary value proposition"

"When a business starts out SaaS-like—solving problems that are more important to customers than demand generation—the most common problems it's usually solving is payments."

"As we move to the right of the business model spectrum, the sophistication of value props offered to supply increases."

"A light marketplace usually offers leads or connections and leaves it up to the supplier to then close the transaction."

"Moving further to the right, leads gets replaced as a value prop by liquidity. As opposed to creating leads, liquidity requires more of a focus on matching and that the marketplace does work to ensure supply attracts demand."

"For demand, the value proposition landscape is a bit simpler. If I am a SaaS company, I have no relationship with demand, and therefore offer them no value prop."

"For a SaaS-like network, it’s really about making the transaction with the supplier as efficient as possible."

"This is one of the more tricky areas as depending on where the company wants to sequence to over time, it will make different decisions on how to handle payments."

"If the company only ever aspires to be SaaS or a light marketplace, it will probably not invest in its own 1st party payments products."

"But if it’s, say, a SaaS-like network on its way to being some sort of managed marketplace, it will not remove its payment infrastructure as it starts to offer light marketplace value props only to rebuild them when it shifts again to a managed model."

"Payments also allow the company to enforce policies that build trust in the marketplace."

"SaaS companies that provide software to business have no relationship with the consumer of that business, and therefore, no branding to them. SaaS-like networks have a relationship with the consumer, but that consumer is not considered their customer."

"The consumer risks transacting with a poor supplier, and the company doesn't guarantee the transaction."

"This creates confusion for consumers who don’t understand why they would get a different level of support from the company, based on which supplier they chose."

"The broader trend you might have noticed is the further right a company goes, the more in general it is doing to manage the business."

"But there is no way to move to the right of this spectrum without making more in the process to finance all of the extra services."