The Marketplace Guy

A weekly memo on building online marketplaces - with real data from the platform underneath them.

payments

Escrow on Stripe Connect: the three places the money can sit

Aug 29, 2026

•

4 min read

Escrow on Stripe Connect: the three places the money can sit

Hold the buyer's money until the job is done. Three ways to do it on Stripe Connect, the one I'd pick for most booking marketplaces.

Rasmus Sorensen

growth

I sell marketplace apps now. I'll still talk most of you out of one.

Aug 18, 2026

•

3 min read

I sell marketplace apps now. I'll still talk most of you out of one.

The 30-second test that tells you whether a mobile app grows your marketplace or just burns a few thousand dollars.

Rasmus Sorensen

operations

Aug 16, 2026

•

4 min read

Who pays for the shipping label?

Shipping on a marketplace isn't a logistics problem. It's a fourth money flow - and if you don't design it, the answer to the title is: you.

Rasmus Sorensen

data

The AI engines name my competitor in 99% of answers. Me: 17%.

Aug 6, 2026

•

3 min read

The AI engines name my competitor in 99% of answers. Me: 17%.

I asked ChatGPT and Claude the twelve questions my buyers actually ask, three times each, and counted every brand they named. This is day one of the scoreboard.

Rasmus Sorensen

postmortems

Everything I've built (half of it is dead)

Aug 2, 2026

•

4 min read

Everything I've built (half of it is dead)

Ten projects, one exit, five shutdowns - and the pattern I only saw afterwards.

Rasmus Sorensen

growth

Nobody brags about their B2B marketplace. They just make money.

Aug 2, 2026

•

3 min read

Nobody brags about their B2B marketplace. They just make money.

Why B2B marketplaces quietly outperform consumer ones - and what B2B founders actually ask for, ranked from the requests that land in my inbox.

Rasmus Sorensen