Anthemos Georgiades shares three lessons for marketplace founders: network effects take years, not press coverage. Compound small wins like 2% weekly growth into real scale. Watch for inorganic growth cheat codes like acquisitions, new platforms, or AI that can suddenly accelerate you.
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So do you have any tips maybe for earlier stage marketplace founders that might be helpful? Yeah, I mean, I guess like 3 things come to mind. So I think thing one is like, yeah, if you build it, they won't come. Like just because you launch a great product, like on day one, just, I understand the humility, like it won't take off. We launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. There were 5,000 people in the audience. I think there were like 50,000 people streaming it on techcrunch.com, like on the main page and like our MAUs on, or DAUs on day one were like insane. And then like they never recovered for like, I don't think we got to that level of DAU for like several more years. So just because you get a fancy press article, we had Andreessen and Kleiner in our press release, yada yada, there was no network effect. So it doesn't matter. This, it takes a while. And so I think like kind of point 2 is, yeah, marketplace liquidity takes a while. And it's all about compounding small wins. The way we got to that 85% of inventory I talked about earlier in each core market was like celebrating small wins and getting inventory from 60% to 64% in a week. Like it just celebrated— it takes time. There are invisible wins that really matter. And Marketplace, apart from a couple of like SEO algo updates that benefited or hurt or benefited us, that it's not a linear— you don't get that vertical leap. It's the compound and the arc of gravity. So just compound small wins, use your all hands to compound a 2% week-on-week growth compounded is a lot. Like compound those wins and it takes time. And I think the third one for us has been like inorganic opportunities. Compound the wins, build marketplace liquidity, build the right company. But every now and again, there's like a cheat code. to just get big faster. So one, a couple for us, one was acquiring PamMapper. We could have, the timing was right to acquire this other platform in our space that at the time had the same traffic as we did. So we doubled the night after we acquired PamMapper. Other ones were like building for new platforms and just taking a gamble. So building iPhone and Android apps, huge win. Building iWatch or Apple Watch and Apple Wear, Android Wear, we knew great platforms weren't obvious for rental apps or notifications, didn't really move the needle on traffic, but you have to take the gamble. And it's same in, same with kind of AI and ChatGPT and Bard, like, kind of opportunity for kind of a vertical leap if you pull it off. So That final— what I guess to conclude is kind of like, if you build it, they won't come. Don't— it takes time in a marketplace, like years. I don't think we have marketplace liquidity for 2 or 3 years. So it took years. 2 is compound small wins, celebrate them with your team. Small wins are big wins if compounded. And the 3rd one is look for cheats. There's always a cheat code. They may come 1 or 2 a year, sometimes 1 or 2 every couple of years. But when you see a cheat code, grab it.
