You’ll notice there were some similarities in all these industries before the big guys came along and disrupted everything: They were all highly fragmented, not just in one geographic region, but globally.
It had thousands of applications but remained plagued with a lack of transparency, standardization, and infrastructure that kept it from realizing its true potential .
In my case, I saw that suppliers and consumers on either side of the industrial cannabis equation were looking for ways to safely exchange products in a notoriously opaque industry, making for an excellent entrepreneurial opportunity.
Netflix’s tagline is “See what’s next,” Uber says “Move the way you want,” Carvana promotes “The New Way to Buy a Car,” and Airbnb shows you exactly how to “Belong anywhere.” That’s why we label these companies as ‘disruptors’ rather than tech, product, or service companies.
The best platforms can figure out ways to build stickiness, whether it’s by keeping identities confidential .
For us at Canxchange, this meant building a platform that acted as a real-time exchange pricing index, enabling cannabis to be thought of as a commodity that buyers and sellers could track to see where the real market lay.
When you take a market-building approach, you’re not thinking of the next new platform or product – you’re rethinking how an ecosystem works, and how your solution impacts its participants.