Manifold providers

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This post is dedicated to our mighty team of providers

Build or Buy hero image

Should You Build Or Buy An Add-ons Marketplace?

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GraphQL vs. REST: What’s The Advantage?

Manifold Web Components

Manifold Web Components: Our Evolution From REST To GraphQL

render announcement header

The rate at which DevOps teams that rely on cloud services from Render will be able to discover new tools is about to increase significantly, thanks to Render’s new alliance with Manifold, a provider of a marketplace-as-a-service platform.

Announcing Early Access To Render Add-ons Powered By Manifold

We’re excited to announce early access to our first [Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS)](/blog/announcing-marketplace-as-a-service-for-developer-platforms) platform partnership with [Render.com](https://render.com). This partnership delivers new add-on capabilities to the Render platform through an [integrated marketplace,](/platforms/render) giving developers the freedom and choice to discover, purchase, and manage their favorite cloud services from the context and familiarity of the Render dashboard. 

Render is the first platform partner to integrate with Manifold's catalog of cloud-native APIs, tools, and services. We’re just getting started, with more platform integrations underway.

## Meet Render

Founded by <a href="https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-anurag-goel-of-render-cfcad8e92dae" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Anurag Goel</a>, formerly of Stripe, Render is a unified cloud platform that lets developers build and run all their websites, apps, static sites, background workers, and microservice APIs from one place at a lower cost than traditional cloud platforms. 

Render is focused on making it incredibly easy for developers to deploy applications without requiring up-front expert knowledge of the underlying server infrastructure.  Goel wants to bring the same level of simplicity to application hosting that Stripe brings to payments.  With their fully integrated GitHub workflow, continuous integration has never been easier with automatic deployments and pull request previews.

> "Render is building the logical next step to cloud infrastructure — making it disappear. Application developers clearly want to focus on the functionality and usability of their work, and not on server setup, deployment, and scaling. Render is enabling exactly this focus and that’s why early developer users love it so much," Anurag said in a recent <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/25/render-gets-2-25m-seed-round-as-infrastructure-alternative-to-biggest-names-in-tech" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">TechCrunch interview.</a>

Today you can provision logging and monitoring services while staying in the context of Render’s dashboard starting with two of Manifold’s most popular tools: LogDNA and Scout. Render can continue to curate a catalog of add-ons that best fits their customer needs as they grow.

---

<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Want to add your API-first product to our catalog?</h4>
<a title="get in touch" href="/providers"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/1ua3948Uno8CZTy7d4ORwT/5590344491e535fb0d90dca02dd4e094/get_in_touch.png" style="max-width: 193px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>

---


## Powered by Manifold

At Manifold, our mission is to connect developers with the cloud tools and services they want, in the places where they choose to build. We’ve built an [extensible MaaS toolkit](/platforms) that enables developer communities and platforms to expand the services they provide without tackling marketplace-specific challenges such as billing, provisioning, integration, credential management, and partner management. 

With Manifold MaaS, Render can focus on building the cloud platform capabilities that embody their core mission, while the Manifold-powered marketplace provides specialized tools for operational services such as logging and monitoring. 


## How it works

Let's go through a real-life example of creating services directly on Render with an existing Render project and integrate a new LogDNA instance onto the platform.

<video style="max-width: 100%" width="100%" height="auto" controls autoplay loop class="video">
  <source src="//videos.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/6H7KThTKxggJP3zJtxYlwA/23b6ca464a8620c1bf6966dc71171413/render-fade-low-br.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

### Creating a new add-on

Let’s assume we have an existing Render project to work with. If you’re new to Render, following the <a href="https://render.com/docs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">quickstart docs</a> will get you up and running in no time (as of the time of this blog post, Render supports Node.js, Python, Ruby, Elixir, Go, Rust, PHP, Docker, and static HTML/file hosting.)

Next, go to the new Addons tab at the top of your Render dashboard (avialble to select developers during early access period).

![creating a new Manifold addon on Render](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/2Rmo7i1KzI6gJ5af2Isvd1/f3cc2762289cbd8a11e031bfa23c22d5/create.jpg)

Render currently features <a href="https://logdna.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">LogDNA</a>, an award-winning logging and monitoring tool for most server-side applications, and <a href="https://scoutapm.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Scout</a>, an application performance monitor (APM) for Ruby, Elixir, Python, and PHP.

We’ll provision a new LogDNA instance by selecting LogDNA, which will show us more details about the service before continuing.

![selecting a new Manifold LogDNA service on Render](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/4f5v1OLZFPMZ1kcKGrURT3/60d2452b12204e69040901daf8db06ae/choose.jpg)

On the next screen, the free plan is already selected for us (larger, paid plans will be arriving soon), so all we need to do is provide an easy name for us to remember (don’t worry; you can always change this later).

![naming a new Manifold LogDNA instance on Render](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/32SDJ5vKCwWMwDTfQhLfPf/7ece2e91b4f0ab45c0d0aded73adcc43/plan.jpg)

Once it’s done spinning up, we can see our new service. From here we can see our addon name, plan, availability, and credentials. But the best part is that we can log straight into our new LogDNA dashboard without having to create a separate account. Click SSO into Dashboard to launch LogDNA’s full dashboard:

![sso](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/1gJ7ndFPxI60k7L79hGDCX/c89210f94540625867839e2f2919fd24/sso.jpg)


Once LogDNA has been created, we can access our logs directly from Render, saving time while staying in context.

![the LogDNA dashboard, authenticated from Render](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/r1coCD1n8AWXaprW8wqv6/6b0328878517004c2c16e7a10f85b633/008.jpg)

To show this in action, we’ve made an [example Node.js app](https://github.com/manifoldco/express-hello-world) that takes a form input, and logs everything to:

```js
console.log();
```

That’s it—`stdout`. With any app that’s running on Render with a LogDNA service, anything that appears in `stdout` will log straight to LogDNA 🎉. 

![logdna](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/1GRodZx8wEZRqYEwQXsTGq/9323fc60ad0befe72bd01d485999d8b6/logdna.gif)

(Note: During the early access period, you have to trigger a Manual Deploy of existing services to start sending logs to LogDNA. This will be addressed very soon.)

We’re excited to show you how this works, and how our MaaS toolkit enabled a cloud platform like Render to offer features like logging and monitoring, without building them. We also like how it enables services like Scout and LogDNA to reach developers in a natural context and get started quickly.

---

<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Want to try out the new Add-ons?</h4>
<a title="request access to add-ons" href="https://render.com/chat"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/6qHLbWcUakUrmbc9qGzKVG/b625927b0b430c6df91d2a385b9317bd/request-access-to-add-ons.png" style="max-width: 274px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>

---


### Bonus: pull request previews

Render provides the automatic ability to get <a href ="https://render.com/docs/pull-request-previews" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer">preview links</a> for all your pull requests on GitHub. To enable this, go to your service page, navigate to the Pull Requests tab, and click Enable Pull Request Reviews.

![Render preview links](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/2YYpaGdBUUYmd3qpbl6110/eff66367245f6f0bd916952cf5e795e7/prs.jpg)

Now Render will show every pull request in your Render dashboard and comment on every PR in GitHub with a handy link:

![Render Pull Request Preview comment on GitHub](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/7ziRSYiOc16DeWQGSABrys/17894887551e0e22849396c10539c32f/011.jpg)

---

Check out the <a href="https://render.com/docs/pull-request-previews" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Render docs</a> to learn more about what Render can do, from YAML infrastructure orchestration to zero-downtime deploys.

## More to come

Manifold is an integrated marketplace deployed as a service on a developer cloud platform. Manifold’s MaaS not only creates value for Render and their community of developers, it also helps [service providers](/providers) reach more users.  And this is just the first of several [cloud platforms](/platforms) where you’ll see the Manifold catalog this year.  

With Manifold’s [new Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS)](/platforms), developer-facing platforms can now add a cloud services marketplace to their ecosystem with little effort and zero upfront costs.

Three years ago, we set out to build a streamlined solution to help developers discover and manage cloud services on any platform. Today we are making our core marketplace technology available to developer platforms through an embeddable service.

> With the release of Manifold’s Marketplace-as-a-Service, we’ve made it easy for any developer facing company to deliver an amazing add-on experience.
>
> __- Jevon MacDonald__, co-founder and CEO of Manifold.

Developers want to have easy access to the tools and services they know and love, but building a marketplace of add-on tools, services, and server images is complex, and can take years. It requires a significant mix of technology and business development investments. Instead, platforms can simply use Manifold’s Marketplace-as-a-Service to rapidly add a fully populated marketplace ready for their developer customers to use, driving increases in customer adoption and revenue.

Integrating the MaaS is simple and fully customizable with a GraphQL API and flexible web components.  The marketplace comes pre-populated with a customizable catalog of cloud service providers that is always growing, as well as unified experiences for billing, role-based access control (RBAC), centralized secret management, service provider on-boarding, and provisioning.

![how it works](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/2DYXvpfH0mgz3m7bNtyLZ7/3f81dd9d2aca94b82d25352523d9ec58/how_it_works.jpg)

Our higher order Web Components provide an out-of-the-box experience which automatically authenticates with the Manifold marketplace API to discover, provision, and manage resources, and makes starting your own marketplace a breeze.

The experience can be further customized through integrating individual Web Components, or by interacting directly with the Manifold marketplace API using our GraphQL interface.

![cloud platform](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/2VGhZdelWCfmjoaREb5Opu/b79cd41b2f1308af4ff67457f6179482/cloud_platform.jpg)

Your web UI uses Manifold auth to connect your user to our Marketplace API to create a contextualized experience.

With an integrated marketplace, you have complete control to customize the types of services available in your catalog. You can choose services from our existing catalog and also introduce your own products and services.

---
<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Want to embed your own marketplace?</h4>
<a title="get in touch" href="/platforms"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/1ua3948Uno8CZTy7d4ORwT/5590344491e535fb0d90dca02dd4e094/get_in_touch.png" style="max-width: 193px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>

---


## Providers
Cloud service providers build great technology that developers want, but it can be difficult and time consuming to scale it into a profitable business. It requires them to reach an increasingly fragmented developer community, build complex billing engines, and establish operational capabilities. In <a href="https://medium.com/hostifi/hostifi-2-0-why-im-completely-rewriting-my-5-735-mrr-saas-d2744734b42e" target="_blank">this recent article</a>, Reilly Chase from HostiFi takes us behind the scenes of what it's like to build his own company and some of the challenges he faced.

By partnering with Manifold, [service providers](/providers) can avoid a lot of these challenges and list their products in our marketplace, write their own descriptions and set their own pricing.  At the end of every month, they get paid for the usage that’s generated through Manifold.

![provider dashboard](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/UiBhMMAyBIx0bzhd41ywh/f15e0710bdd4c30247681c0e4093efb6/provider_dashboard.jpg)

Providers get a complete billing solution and will benefit from our direct marketing activities as well as from partnerships we establish with strategic developer platforms. As mentioned above, these platform partners embed our catalog and use our provisioning and billing technology to offer an add-on marketplace to their users. Getting listed in these marketplaces puts our providers’ products in front of millions of developers around the world. For example, the platforms we are currently working with have over 12 million developers and this number will only grow over time as we partner with more ecosystems.


---
<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Watch the announcement webinar to learn about being a Provider</h4>
<a title="Watch webinar" href="https://manifold.wistia.com/medias/9oxwrqt1d3" target="_blank"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/5KGwkTS53fbR9TjpgaaN9A/99ce7ab490ffbdae4ce35cd7435cb096/watch_the_webinar.png" style="max-width: 225px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>

---

__Want to add your product to our catalog?__ [Learn more](/providers)

## Developers
Modern developers are using more cloud services for their applications than ever before. According to F5’s State of Application Services report for 2019, <a href="https://www.f5.com/state-of-application-services-report/interactive-report-2019/key-finding-1" target="_blank">“87% of respondents have multi-cloud architectures, driven by an app-first methodology”</a>.  As the number of services continues to grow, they must choose their cloud platform carefully or risk getting locked into one that limits the tools available to them. Provisioning new services also requires developers to establish separate payment and security profiles with every provider. This gets pretty complex when teams of developers need access to the same services.

Using Manifold, developers can discover, provision, secure and pay for all of their cloud services and share access with their team from a single account.

![terminal](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/5aQZrwO7eRJukdP0X910FU/5fce602fc75c7617f3dc2e4bc51a9929/terminal.jpg)

<div style="text-align: center">
<h3>Get started with Manifold</h3>
<a title="explore the marketplace" href="/services"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/3P1rlqMoaO9DHMVcYxORDp/322346116ea88ddeb3dded3fe1c18fec/explore_the_marketplace.png" style="max-width: 225px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>


Platform Announcement Blog Post Header

With Manifold’s new Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS), developer-facing platforms can now add a cloud services marketplace to their ecosystem with little effort and zero upfront costs.

Announcing Marketplace-as-a-Service for Developer Platforms


Build it and they will come, right? Unfortunately, that's not always how it works. In a world where every existing product is battling for fleeting attention and new developer tools are launching every day on ProductHunt, it can be tough to get the right people to notice your product – and more importantly, remember it when they need it.

Even the most promising technology can struggle to gain traction without a thoughtful marketing strategy. Understanding the fundamentals and learning from some of the best in the industry can put your company on the right path for growth.

## Defining the Challenge

Marketing a new service to developers can be tricky for several reasons. First, developers are consistently sold to because they carry significant sway in the purchasing decisions for the companies that they work for. This pent up ad and sale fatigue make difficult to get your message across typical marketing channels. 

The second factor is that there is a high overhead for changing mission-critical services and switching  typically involves significant work on the part of the developer(s) and their team. So the benefits of using your new tool or technology must outweigh those hefty switching costs clearly and obviously.

Lastly, technical audiences tend to vet new products in a much more critical way. Standard landing pages with fluffy copywriting underperform solution-based product pages backed up quantitatively. 

Taking those factors into consideration it becomes more clear why some of the best developer focused software products build their marketing strategy around content.

## Kicking off with Content

Not all content is created equally. Browsing Medium you're sure to come across posts announcing the launch of a new product or service that leaves readers thinking "ok, so what?" A post like that might get a few clicks throughs,  but after that visit, the product fades away. 

What best-in-class companies do is use content to create a story. They deeply understand their ideal user's daily life and daily struggles – and understand how their product can fit in to that flow. They then create content around questions, concerns, and solutions that are truly useful. Sometimes, the content doesn’t even mention their product. It is advice, suggestions, and data that builds brand recognition around a known problem.

Here are some ideas to get your gears churning:

- __Tutorials__ - If your product truly solves a problem (and it should!) creating content around defining and solving that problem is a great place to start. You can create tutorials for several mediums like blogs, video, and social to see what works and what doesn't. Then, once you start to see results you can narrow your strategy moving forward.
- __Comparisons__ - These are typically the top performing search engine landing pages for technical products and once your company starts to get some recognition is an area that should be invested in. When users are evaluating a new tool they want to see how it stacks up technically and monetarily. Creating well-designed product pages and blog post that can rank well in search results is a great way to own the conversation and highlight your differentiators. 
- __Courses/Webinars__ - If you're an expert on a topic, teach it. There are several low-friction platforms out there for hosting this type of content that make management easy. One caveat is to make sure the content is directionally related to your product. Educational videos are a great way to give some of your knowledge away in exchange for an email. They are also a helpful lead tool for your website and for advertising campaigns.
- __Case Studies__ - spending time on case studies is an easy way to ease buyer concern about using your product. They want to see recognizable names that have used and have loved your product. Give away a free subscription if you have to, it will be worth it. 
- __eBooks__ - while they may be more time consuming to create, eBooks are great way to provide deep value and instantly brand yourself or your company as an expert on a topic. CloudAMPQ and Intercom are two companies that have successfully used eBooks to drive customer growth. A great way to cut down on the time and cost to create an eBook is to write a series of blog posts on a particular topic. Once the series is complete, repackage and bundle the collection as an eBook.
- __Data__ - if your product offers interesting insights try to package it in a way that would be useful to other developers. While in a different category, Match.com annually publishes a study on singles in the US and it drives traffic, press and undoubtedly users back to their product. 

## Learn from the best
One of the best ways to learn a new skill is to watch how the best in the industry execute. Here are some of the best-in-class that are worth a follow:

- __Digital Ocean__ - Regardless of industry Digital Ocean has one of the most impressive [content machines](https://www.digitalocean.com/community). They consistently publish fresh, original content that specifically caters to their audience and is always on-trend. It doesn't hurt that they have an amazing product, but the way they source, create and organize content is top-notch.
- __Basecamp__ - the company has transcended project management software and has become the leader of a no-nonsense business movement. Their founders have [published four books](https://basecamp.com/books) on the topic (one being a national bestseller) and have a high traffic blog that consistently beats the drum of this story which also trickles to their brand and product pages. 
- __LogDNA__ - the log management tool does a great job with content and branding to make B2B feel very approachable and customer focused. Their blogs and [white papers](https://logdna.com/whitepapers/) are very digestible for all types of customer personas. They also have a public Slack channel which adds a great layer of trust to potential custmers.  
- __New Relic__ - the company uses their large content library to power their wide-reaching advertising campaigns and target large enterprise companies. Take a peek at [their website’s](https://newrelic.com/) footer and you'll find answers to every possible question an end-users, manager or CTO might have before agreeing to a contract. 

## What next

So you've spent a few weeks creating great content you think potential users will love. Now what? Here are a few things you can start with:

- __Let SEO do its thing__ - The more content you create, the better your existing content will rank. This process typically plays out over several months, but you should start seeing consistent gains in organic search traffic
- __Start small with advertising__ - The great added benefit of creating a library of content is that you can use the content for advertising assets on Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit. Ads using helpful content tend to perform much better than those screaming BUY NOW and act as a great introduction to your brand. Even starting with a small budget can be useful for baselining content performance and guiding future content creation.
- __Partner with a marketplace__ - adding your service to a marketplace like Manifold is a great way to get instant distribution. Marketplaces have established marketing muscle that you can leverage to help spread the word to entirely new audiences.
- __Syndicate__ - A helpful rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time creating your content and 50% promoting. That means posting on social networks, Reddit, hackernews and reaching out to friends that can help spread the word. If you mention complementary products in your content make sure to tag them or ask if they would be willing to share the post as well. Also, emailing new content to leads or free users is a great way to re-warm them to your product.

The benefit of investing in content marketing is that it has compound returns. Start today and start seeing the results grow month-over-month. As the adage goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.



marketing to developers

6 Ways You Should Be Marketing Your API to Developers	

When looking to launch a new product or feature, every company has to decide whether to build it in-house or buy it (e.g., license/partner) from a third-party vendor. The choice you make can have an immense impact on the bottom line for your business. The considerations surrounding the decision to build or buy custom software for a developer-facing add-ons marketplace is a common question for us at Manifold.

Before discussing the primary considerations during the build vs. buy decision-making process, we should discuss why offering an add-ons marketplace to your users is right for your business. Offering your developers a marketplace of complementary products such as cloud infrastructure, managed services, and APIs can provide substantial benefits to your business. It essentially turns any product-based business (single product-line to multiple product-lines) into a platform business, where buyers and sellers can interact while you facilitate the matchmaking and gain a share of the transaction revenue in the process.

The benefits of providing an add-ons marketplace for developers don’t stop there. It also creates stickiness as you give developers more options and different ways to use the resources available on your platform. Offering users more value than your competition also sets you apart from the crowd, gives you a diversified revenue stream, and ultimately makes your customers happy to use your platform.

The issue is, do you want to invest the time, focus, and resources to build and maintain an add-ons marketplace, or would you prefer to focus on building your core product and outsource the development and maintenance to a company that specializes in building marketplaces and already has the technology and partnerships in place?

The decision to build versus buy a marketplace offering is no small task and is often more art than science, coming down to the particular needs of your business, appetite for risk vs. return, financial stability, team size, and your long term corporate strategy. Here are some things to consider during the decision-making process. 

### Core to product

Arguably the most critical consideration requires you to ask questions such as: 
- Is a marketplace core to my business strategy and the product(s) I offer? 
- Will a marketplace continue to sustain attention and focus from our executive and cross-functional teams?
- Will a marketplace be financed sufficiently to outlast the “chicken and egg” conundrum?

Building an add-ons marketplace will take a significant amount of time, focus, and resources away from your business. The development of the underlying marketplace functionality such as unified billing and provisioning, single sign-on, identity, and authentication usually take longer than expected. Business development is going to be a critical investment as well since numerous partnerships have to be developed, onboarded, nurtured, and supported to create a healthy ecosystem of add-on providers for your marketplace catalog.

Without thoroughly considering the upfront investments and risks, building a marketplace offering may also come with some unexpected consequences that could be detrimental to the health of your business long term, not just from a financial perspective but from a cultural perspective as well. 

### Control 

How much control does your business need over a marketplace product offering? Some things to consider are relationships and technical integrations with vendors, user support, payment collections, partner distributions, and security, to name a few. 

When doing due diligence on a potential partner for your marketplace, ensure they are aligned with your values, and are flexible enough to bring your users the complete experience that you want to deliver them.

For example, you may want to only have a few complementary vendors in your add-ons marketplace, and you want these integrations tightly coupled with your core product. Find a partner that is willing to work with you and the vendors to ensure both parties are satisfied with the integration and that it gives your developers a superior experience than they would get with a competitor’s offering.

### Costs (carrying costs and efficiency)

Run the numbers. Estimate development time and work required, followed by determining the number of dedicated employees needed to build and maintain a developer-facing marketplace. Remember, marketplaces have many different underlying product requirements, for example: 
- A flexible billing model that is robust enough to handle different types of plans and business models (e.g., fixed monthly, metered, add-ons, anniversary billing, annual discounts, and more.) 
- Provisioning flows to enable seamless self-serve experiences.
- Authentication and identity features, such as role-based access controls and single sign-on. 
- Integrations with add-on providers for complete end-to-end workflows.

The costs associated with building a marketplace are not small due to the labor required to build and maintain such an offering. The carrying cost consideration comes down to if your business wants to consider the marketplace as a cost center with the lion’s share of the upside (build), or, as a complementary offering that can be up and running quickly with relatively minimal development resources required to build and maintain while sharing a portion of the revenue with a partner (buy). 

Another way to think about it would be to consider fixed costs vs. variable costs, with labor as a relatively fixed cost when building a marketplace versus a variable cost structure with a revenue share allocated to a partner. 

There may be a tremendous impact on the cost efficiency of your business as well. If you decide to build a marketplace on your own, will you be able to hire the best talent with experience building ecosystems and marketplace functionality? How long will it take your employees to get ramped up with proper architecture and designs? Deciding to buy/partner, you are choosing to work with experts who already have it figured out. They have uncovered all of the technical pitfalls associated with developing marketplace technology and have playbooks with established processes to manage all aspects of the solution.

### Competition

Is your company the only competitor in your space, or are you finding it more challenging to stand out in a crowded market? Are your competitors launching additional features quicker than you can keep up? By working with a partner to provide your marketplace offering of complementary features, you can blow past your competition by getting to market quickly and surpass the number of product offerings with a pre-developed catalog of add-ons, giving you a differentiated position in the market. 

If your marketplace partner is missing any specific products in their catalog that you would like to offer your users, ask them to initiate the partnership, onboard, and support the integration. It is much easier to convince a new provider to integrate with an ecosystem because they know they get access to a network of platforms rather than just a single product. 

### Deal structure

If you decide to go the ‘buy’ route, you must ensure your partner is aligned with your vision and committed to the long run. This choice is a long term business decision that should not be pursued without full commitment by both parties to share in the success of the marketplace. The details of the agreement and who shares in the upside are essential to get right. 

Each party must have skin in the game, whether that includes intangibles like brand reputation or more tangible monetary aspects such as financial incentives. Including a revenue-sharing element in the agreement is one of the best methods for long term alignment between both parties as it ensures your partner is motivated to help make your marketplace successful. Your partner only wins if you win and vice versa.

A vendor that has a licensing model is great, too, if you want a more lightweight marketplace offering. If you are a smaller business, you want to avoid working with anyone asking for significant upfront costs. However, a reasonably sized implementation fee is fine as vendors have cash flow requirements in their business, as well. 

### Conclusion

Offering a marketplace of cloud infrastructure, managed services, and APIs to developers provides your business with numerous benefits. The decision to build it on your own versus buying it from an established partner includes many factors and can have substantial impacts on the long term success of your business. I hope these tips help you on your journey towards offering your users a superior marketplace experience.

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