8 ways to launch a successful digital platform

The digital platform—connecting people, organizations, and resources in an interactive ecosystem through technology—is taking the business world by storm. The platform model powers many of today's biggest and most disruptive companies, like Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber. Platform businesses bring together producers and users in efficient exchanges of value (think Uber drivers and passengers), and they leverage network effects—the more participants, the greater the value produced.

Building a platform business differs from traditional product or pipeline marketing in a number of ways, perhaps most notably by virtue of its pull (rather than push) strategies. Instead of creating awareness through channels like advertising and PR (that's the push), the goods and services of a platform must attract users with incentives for participating (the pull). In network businesses, marketing must be baked into the platform. While push strategies are still valuable to a platform model, they can easily get lost in a sea of abundance and distraction.

However, platforms and the pull they require poses a conundrum. How can you begin to build a user base for a two-sided market when each side depends on the prior existence of the other? Geoffrey Parker, a visiting scholar and research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, refers to this as the chicken-or-the-egg dilemma in Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – And How to Make Them Work for You. In the book, Parker and his co-writer’s Marshall W. Van Alstyne and Sangeet Paul Choudary, propose eight strategies for beating this dilemma and successfully launching a platform business. We summarized them briefly here, but you can learn more about them in depth in Parker's online MIT Sloan Executive Education program, which starts next week (November 7).