Cloudflare Workers Marketplace

Having rated our business ideas, we were not surprised to see, that all our ideas based on the Cloudflare Workers platform came out on top, with a pretty high rating. Just by how much and how many.

Overall, it does make sense. They scale well, there is near to none upfront financial investment, they are fairly easily build with no frontend necessary, target infrastructure and thus are not depended on user-generated content.

After the first worker was already build and ready, we realized the originally announced Apps with Workers feature, which would have allowed using the Apps marketplace to sell bundled workers, surprisingly never got out of the closed beta.
It was even actively closed as noted in the docs:

Cloudflare's App Workers Beta is now closed. We are no longer accepting new apps that contain Workers scripts to focus on improving the Workers development experience.

That is very atypical for Cloudflare features that typically go to general availability after the closed and then open beta. A more detailed explanation was posted on the forum. Coupled with a promise to be working on another solution.

Learning all this, a defeated feeling set in, and we felt it was our first big lesson of our journey. Not the idea being bad, not having no customers, but our assured monetization platform not existing at all.
Scrutinizing ideas and vetting & validating monetization options, will become a bigger part of the process.

Luckily, accepting this small loss, a few minutes later the next idea formed: Our own Worker marketplace!
Offering a place for everyone, including us, to sell their own workers.

Of course, this idea would be much bigger & more complex, crushing our limitation of only spending a month on any specific idea.
Being confident in this idea, we accepted this and were willing to make an exception.

Especially after putting our heads together, and jotting down the first version of the concept. Building on our ecommerce development experience, pretty wide knowledge of possible technologies & tools and the willingness to try something new.

The main advantage for us here was Swell ecommerce SaaS:

Swell | Next-level ecommerce for everyone

Swell is the future-proof ecommerce platform that helps you build, sell, and scale your way.

Next-level ecommerce for everyone

They offer loads of flexibility for developers, solid docs, flexible API, switching out the checkout completely & the option to change the database models for every entity, instead of just using metafields / custom fields like competing options.

Marketplaces ecommerce platform | Swell

Use Swell’s powerful built-in features to build a multi-vendor marketplace faster than using a custom ecommerce platform.

Swell

A few things stood out:

1. A great pricing scheme for startups, where you don't pay anything until you earn the first buck & the ability to switch to a more profitable plan later on, when the revenue is big enough.
2. Supporting the frontend stack out of the box & hosted, that we wanted to use anyway: Nuxt
   As well as allowing to host the headless frontend yourself, like on Cloudflare Workers.
3. A preexisting guide to build a marketplace with Swell, from Swell itself:

Developer Center: Build a marketplace | Swell

Learn how to build a marketplace by leveraging Swell’s flexible backend API to implement marketplace logic as well as support for vendors and payouts to those vendors.

Swell

This guide is based Stripe Connect, which allows easy distribution of revenue shares to multiple partners. It simplifies the booking immensely, as it immediately transfers the appropriate share to each vendor immediately.
Meaning we would never have that money in our accounts and don't need to deal with it.

Stripe Connect | Platform and Marketplace Payment Solutions

Stripe Connect is the fastest and easiest way to integrate payments and financial services into your software platform or marketplace.

Platform and Marketplace Payment SolutionsJohannes Koeppel

Of course, every idea comes with its new challenges. This time, it was the limitation of Cloudflare Workers to have only one Worker active on each request route at each given time.

Having some client prospects in mind, that could benefit from at least one of our Worker idea, while already using a Worker for caching, this limitation was to be circumvented.

As hoped, this lead to the next idea: A Worker router!