A community can be a strong foundation for a marketplace. In the early days, it helps with onboarding initial supply and demand and creates trust. Later, it can form a powerful moat that defends the marketplace from competitors.

But building a community takes time and work and, most importantly, engaging in it yourself.

In this episode, Sjoerd interviews Gene Miguel, CEO and co-founder of Shortboxed, a marketplace for buying and selling comic books.

Gene and his co-founder have been lifelong comic book nerds. They both had day jobs in tech, but dealt comic books on the side and spent their days off at comic book conventions. They also started a comic book blog, around which slowly a community started to form.

As dealers, they experienced first-hand how poorly and inefficiently the entire comic book secondary market was run. That’s when they decided to build Shortboxed.

In this season’s final Two-Sided interview, Gene shares:

• How starting a blog helped them build the community
• How building in public with the community helped them onboard the first supply and demand
• What a double-bind marketplace is, and why Shortboxed uses that model
• How they faked many features by running them manually before automating them

A compelling story of a marketplace where passion is combined with a solid business case.