We're sharing a recent announcement & update post from the community by Mike Williams, mentioning our community themes for 2026. This was originally shared as a post in the community here.

As you all know, it’s an exciting time in the world of marketplaces. We’re seeing one of the biggest technology shifts with AI and also distribution. Both are reshaping how marketplaces are built, scaled, and operated. It’s clear that we’ve entered the next era for marketplaces.

I’ve mentioned this to a few of you already, but we have two key themes for the community this year: how marketplaces can leverage AI and distribution.
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We’re going to be focusing our content, resources, and also events around these two topics this year. That means we’ll be creating more dedicated resources, discussing them here in the community, on our group chats, weekly office hours, and even doing workshops on the topics.
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We also have founders at various stages, so we’ll be approaching them both with this in mind. For AI, we’ll cover how existing marketplaces can leverage AI today, along with how founders can build the next generation of AI-native marketplaces. For distribution, we’ll be focusing on the importance of having a distribution strategy and advantage across various stages, starting with going from 0-1. Our goal with this is to help everyone build a better marketplace in 2026.
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I’m excited to announce these themes and I think this will really help us all understand the importance of them both, how they specifically apply to marketplaces, have actionable strategies you can implement, resources to use, and a community of others to turn to for support and insightful discussions throughout the year.
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Let me know if you have any feedback or even any initial questions on either topic so we can start to discuss them. I’ll also include a few links to initial resources on both topics in the replies below.
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