The Prospress Story

Toward the end of 2009, I had a realisation. A friend was just starting a marketplace for data analysis & forecasting, I’d recently discovered 99designs and Airbnb. I felt a growing trend in using online marketplaces to offer new solutions to existing problems.

Around the same time, I’d fallen in love with WordPress. It’s simplicity was a revelation.

These two events combined into the realisation that there are thousands of opportunities for niche & novel online marketplaces, but no tool to make starting a marketplace as simple as starting a blog.

I began to see the potential of a WordPress for marketplaces and decided to build it.

Unique Design

There is little fundamental difference between any marketplace, whether its used for trading empty rooms, home cooked meals or graphic design services. All marketplaces have a way to build trust, a way to make and accept payments, a way to post listings and a way to purchase or bid.

Knowing this, I created Prospress with a generic feedback, payment and posting system. I then created a central system to integrate them and implement the unique logic for different trading systems. This architecture would allow Prospress to be used to rapidly develop new marketplaces and reduce the cost of experimentation with different market designs.

One Platform, Many Marketplaces

Prospress version 1 offers a simple auction system. However, Prospress can also power:

• Reverse Auctions – sellers bid and bid prices go down, not up, think Elance
• Image Auctions – bid in jpgs not dollars, think 99designs and crowdSPRING
• Competitions – a winner is chosen on criteria, not just a bid value, think Kaggle
• Collaborative Auctions – every bid contributes towards a common goal, think Kiva and Kickstarter

Prospress can even run these different marketplaces side-by-side.

But the story is only just beginning. Prospress is young and its potential is barely been realised. As its open source, you can help author the future of its story by contributing to the project.