Max Brun interviews an OfferUp founder about the local marketplace app. OfferUp has processed over $230 billion in transactions with $40 billion annual GMV, focusing on visual browsing, user profiles, and ratings to build trust between neighbors buying and selling nearby.
Chapters
But for a little bit of context, you know, could you give us kind of an overview of OfferUp as a marketplace today and maybe touch on some of the unique aspects of it?
Yeah. You know, I think overall, like I was saying today, you know, we, I really think my vision was always to build a marketplace for local, full stop. And what do I mean by that? Like, you know, it's kind of a challenging world we live in where it's easier to get an item delivered to you from China than it is down the street. That's where we live. So how do you unlock all this friction? And so, you know, again, I think this is a good input. I just hold out, I take a photo, I can message and chat. Great. But how do you build on a marketplace kind of over time? And so, you know, we do, you know, since I started OfferUp, probably over $230 billion with a B in transactions. So we do over $40 billion a year. We're probably one of the largest I don't know, probably top, maybe even top 10 marketplaces in the world in terms of just GMV and sell-through. And then we've got, you know, so that was an important metric, but the other one is also just scale. Like I always would look at size of populations. And so like I mentioned LA, Seattle's about 25% of all the adults every month. So you go, okay, great. You got all this, you got a really, we got a good foundation of usage of local activity. Now, what do you do with that? And so, like, we just launched local jobs very, very recently. You know, we'll explore other types of businesses and opportunities we can layer on to the marketplace we've built. We'll explore things like last mile and how do we continue to, you know, solve some of that, the logistical challenges there. So again, I go to the end, at the end of the day, it's all about this funnel and it's all about removing, you know, friction. And so, You know, I think we optimized a lot for simplicity. That was a core kind of tenet. And the other one was trust. You know, I think Craigslist, it's just shocking to me that that company never put time into trust and safety. And that gave us a huge opportunity because we, even before we raised outside money, we were already investing in things like trust and safety. Even the basics, like how about just a profile and a rating system? Right? Like, like what? It's just, you know, and so I think that was our opportunity. So we said, let's be simple. Let's be simple. Let's be trusted. Let's make it delightful. Let's make it a really nice browsing experience. Like, imagine if Craigslist was a retail store and you would go in there and you would just look at tags, right? That's what Craigslist is like. Who shops by looking at text? Nobody, right? And so I said, no, no, no, this just needs to be pictures. And so now you can look around and there's Instagram and all that, but there was no Instagram when we launched. There was no Pinterest on an app when we launched. And so I just had this idea that, you know, I think shopping is an engaging, you know, visual experience. Let's just make it like that in an app. So I think that is kind of the overall idea of OfferUp is to make it enjoyable, but to kind of be your local marketplace on a lot of dimensions. But you can't do all that day one. Like I said, We're like 11 years in now, we still haven't done a ton of things I wanted to do. So if you think of it, if I think of like the last decade, it was all about getting scale and usage that you can now leverage to build other things on top of.
