Marketplace Strategy: When to Build Your Own vs. Join Someone Else's

Software marketplaces — your own ISV ecosystem on top of your product, or a presence in an existing marketplace like AppSource, AWS Marketplace, or Salesforce AppExchange — produce dramatically different economics. Building your own is a multi-year investment. Joining someone else’s is a quarterly motion. The decision criteria matter.

Joining Is Almost Always the Right Starting Move

Most companies should start by joining one or two existing marketplaces before considering building their own. The cost is low (engineering time to ship a listing, ongoing partner ops investment), the upside is immediate (some inbound, credibility, joint go-to-market with the marketplace owner), and the learning is direct (you see how marketplace economics actually work before you build one).

Even companies that eventually build their own marketplace usually maintain presence in major external marketplaces because the audiences are different and the cost of maintaining listings is small relative to the alternative.

Three Conditions That Justify Building Your Own

Condition one: you have at least 5,000 active customers using your product. Below that, there is no audience to attract third-party developers and ISVs. Marketplaces require demand-side liquidity to attract supply-side participation.

Condition two: customers are asking for capabilities you do not want to build natively. If customers consistently request integrations, extensions, or vertical-specific configurations that are outside your core roadmap, a marketplace lets third parties build those without diluting your engineering focus.

Condition three: you have committed engineering resources to platform infrastructure for at least eighteen months. Marketplaces require API surface area, developer documentation, certification processes, billing infrastructure, and ongoing support. Without sustained investment, the marketplace becomes a half-built liability.

Build Economics That Work for ISVs

The single most common mistake in self-built marketplaces is taking too much margin. Marketplaces that take 30%+ of ISV revenue (Apple App Store economics) work only when the platform has overwhelming market power. For most B2B platforms, taking 15-20% is the maximum that attracts quality ISVs.

Better practice for early marketplaces: take 0% for the first 12-24 months while you build supply, then introduce modest revenue share as the marketplace matures. The opportunity cost of slow ISV growth dramatically exceeds the foregone revenue from low takes.

Marketplaces that try to make money in year one usually end up with no marketplace by year three.

Joining Strategy: Pick One or Two, Operate Them Hard

Companies that list themselves in every marketplace they qualify for usually produce nothing from any of them. Marketplace presence is an operating commitment, not a checkbox.

Pick the one or two marketplaces where your ICP actually lives, and operate them as if they were your own go-to-market motion: weekly engagement with the marketplace partner team, customer review acquisition, joint webinars and content, ongoing optimization of the listing based on conversion data.

A single well-operated marketplace listing produces more revenue than ten dormant ones combined. Quality of operation beats quantity of presence by a wide margin.

When Both Make Sense

Mature B2B platforms typically run a hybrid: their own marketplace for core ecosystem extensions and vertical-specific add-ons, plus active presence in two or three major external marketplaces for distribution to those marketplaces’ specific audiences.

The two strategies are complementary at scale, but most companies should not try to run both motions simultaneously in the first three years of platform investment. Build supply on one before extending to the other.