Marketplaces Are Becoming Communities – and Vice Versa

01 /The Concept

Tell an AI what kind of marketplace you want to run, and District builds it for you – fully functional, live, with third-party sellers able to list products and the marketplace owner earning commissions on every sale.

The result is a polished, live marketplace where third-party sellers can list products and the marketplace owner earns commissions on every sale.

A standout feature is built-in live streaming – so sellers can showcase products in real time, run auctions, and engage their audience directly.

Payments, fulfillment, and logistics are handled by District and its partners, so marketplace builders don't need to wire up their own infrastructure.

Beyond one-time sales, marketplace owners can launch subscriptions for gated content or recurring purchases. Group chat is built in, turning each marketplace from a storefront into an actual community of buyers and sellers.

Pricing starts at $29/month for up to 150 sellers and $99/month for up to 5,000. Both tiers include AI credits for adding features to the marketplace, creating email campaigns, and other operations.

District has been building for three years entirely bootstrapped. The platform now hosts 1,000 businesses – mostly marketplace operators, though some individual sellers as well. This week, the startup raised its first external capital: $14.7 million, led by a16z.

02 /Why It Matters

A recent Fortune piece described District as a platform for community-driven marketplaces – and that framing gets at something important.

Conventional marketplaces like Amazon or eBay operate as massive storefronts where price and ratings are the primary sorting mechanisms. The identity of the seller matters less than their review score; the identity of fellow shoppers doesn't matter at all.

District marketplaces are different in kind. Each one is a community of people assembled around a specific topic or subculture.

Consider Stacked Golf, built by a Florida couple who started a YouTube channel reviewing golf balls. They now run a marketplace with over 1,000 sellers of golf gear, generating $150,000 in weekly sales.

Or Niknax, built by an influencer known as "Crazy Lamp Lady," where more than 5,000 sellers offer rare, interesting, and vintage items. It moved over $5 million in goods last year.

District's founders argue that the 2000s gave us marketplaces optimized for price discovery – the digital equivalent of big-box superstores. What's emerging now, they say, is the digital equivalent of the beloved neighborhood shop or specialty hobby store: places people return to because they belong there, not just because the deal is best.

District gives people the infrastructure to build those places online – with the logistics and technology previously available only to large retailers.

This thinking connects to ShopMy ([related review](/review/samyj-jeffektivnyj-marketing-ne-vygljadit-kak-marketing)), which raised two funding rounds last year totaling $147.5 million. Unlike District, ShopMy runs a single marketplace – but one organized around curators (influencers and public figures) who each build their own product selections.

Shoppers go straight to their favorite curators' sections rather than browsing the whole catalog. An additional clever feature: users can create "circles" that aggregate picks from multiple curators, so browsing one circle surfaces a combined collection from everyone they follow.

03 /Opportunities

In most product categories today, supply is no longer the constraint. There are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of similar items from different makers at similar price points. The problem shifts from "where to buy" to "what to buy." People end up researching forums and reviews before purchasing – or browsing first and researching second.

The obvious fix would be finding everything in one trusted place. But the challenge is structural: communities lack the resources to run a store, and stores lack the bandwidth to build and sustain a community. Running a standalone store often means less competitive pricing too, which is why a marketplace model offers more breadth – but managing both a marketplace and an active community is genuinely overwhelming. Unless you outsource the tech and logistics to a platform like District.

So one direction: building the technology and logistics infrastructure that lets communities run marketplaces, as District does.

The other direction: building the community-creation and community-management layer on top of an e-commerce platform, as ShopMy is doing.

Both directions have strong underlying logic, because the integration of communities and commerce isn't just convenient – it's structurally important for both sides.

Marketplaces need communities because communities give buyers better tools for deciding what to buy, and stronger reasons to come back.

Communities need marketplaces for a less obvious but equally important reason. The key insight is that communities with lasting staying power tend to have strong horizontal connections between members – not just a vertical relationship where everyone listens to one authority figure.

The problem with pure vertical communities (guru-and-followers) is that the guru eventually burns out. When they stop posting, the community collapses. The simplest mechanism for keeping horizontal connections alive among members is regular peer-to-peer commerce. Adding marketplace functionality to a community might be the most underrated way to keep it alive long-term.

So: would you rather add a marketplace to a community, or add a community to a marketplace? Both work. Both have real upside.