Sharetribe today launched its full-service marketplace platform for niche communities. The service lets you build hosted sites that can be the “Airbnb for X” or the “Etsy for Y.” With today’s launch, Sharetribe now accepts payments outside the US.
As the sharing economy takes off in full force, Sharetribe provides an easy way for members of affinity groups to sell or rent out goods and services. Pricing starts at $39 a month for up to 300 members and scales up to $239 a month for 100,000 members. Administrators can take a 10 percent cut of transactions in order to fund their marketplaces.
Sample marketplaces include a rental system for farmers to share equipment, a service for booking nannies, a trading platform for toy cars and a collection of venues for photoshoots. Sharetribe lowers the barrier to entry so that even the most obscure communities can start their own site without having to wait for a vertical-specific startup to come along.
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Juho Makkonen, Sharetribe’s CEO, claims it takes as little as 60 seconds to create a new marketplace. Here’s an example of The Quiver, a community built around renting surfboards:
Sharetribe started as a research project for a university in Finland. It has been running in private beta with a small group of marketplaces since last year. The company also announced a $1 million funding round today from Lifeline Ventures, Reaktor Polte and Finnish government fund Tekes.
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