Platform vs Product Decision
Tests whether you have two sides and the patience, since most companies building a platform need neither yet.
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Running it, start to finish
- Check the sides genuinely create value for each other.
- Define the narrowest market where critical mass is reachable.
- Consider launching as a product with single-player value first.
What you get back
The output this produces, every time.
- Tests whether the sides genuinely create value for each other or you have two customer segments.
- Requires a concrete cold-start answer, which is the defining difficulty.
- Models unit economics at achievable scale rather than at the ambition.
Getting better results
Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- Build single-player value first. A product useful to one side alone can become a platform. It is the least attractive plan and usually the right one.
- Define critical mass narrowly. Platforms are local. Thin coverage everywhere serves nobody and is the standard way these launches fail.
- Answer disintermediation before building. Once both sides have met, what keeps them on the platform is frequently the whole business question.
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Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.