The Missing Middle

Vinay Gupta blasted off another thought provoking thread on Twitter the other day.

It's worth reading in full, but Vinay's concept of the 'Missing Middle' deserves another look.

According to Vinay, the 'Missing Middle' refers to the lack of a conspicuous market for easily customizable, high quality goods at fair prices.

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Currently finding low-priced high quality products entails a substantial investment of time to find the equivalent of diamonds in a sea of cheap shit. It also means, essentially, dealing directly with manufacturers.

Unfortunately most people simply can't be bothered to take the time to discover these high quality gems, which is understandable - it can be very hard to identify who these manufacturers are as supply chains are highly guarded secrets. Thus the middle of the market is filled with decent, but crazily marked up products sold in malls.

But as everyone knows, most malls are dying. The opportunity then, as Vinay sees it, is that digital marketplaces which are orders of magnitude better at aiding consumers in discovering high quality products at fair prices will (hopefully) begin to appear and provide a legitimate middle market between high-end designer goods and the oceans of everything.

That future is premised on supply chains becoming more transparent such that market forces (i.e. consumers and their dollars - hi @Xerographica!) will be able to identify and surface low-cost high quality alternatives.

I feel like that could be a possible future, but as Vinay also alluded to within his thread, there are "nerdy-as-hell review blogs" that help surface the best of such cheap alternatives *now*.

To me it's those curators - and more specifically the identifying, surfacing and tracking of their actual purchases - that could serve as a transition strategy towards the future Vinay is envisioning. I know @Xerographica probably agrees, but what say anyone else?