Building A Marketplace MVP Workshop

Welcome to our Everything Marketplaces workshop, which is going to be on building a marketplace MVP today. So we've had lots of founders request a workshop on how to leverage no and low-code tools and platforms to build a marketplace MVP. So that's what we're going to be covering in detail today. So Connor Finlayson will be leading the workshop, and most of you probably know him, but if not, he has some really awesome experience building no and low-code marketplaces like Unicorn Factory. Along with lots of others that he's helped founders build. So as a quick note, in the format for our workshops are once again 20 to 25 minute presentations followed by group Q&A. So if you have any questions, you know, throughout the workshop, you can post them in the Zoom chat. And please be sure to turn on your camera and you can use the Zoom raise hand functionality so that way we know to call on you when we get to the group Q&A. So with that said, you know, thanks for joining us here today to lead the workshop, Connor. And I'll actually just let you start with a brief intro and take it from here.

All right, well, first of all, Mike, thank you so much for having me. I've been a member of Everything Marketplaces for a while, and I've gotten a lot of value out of the community, so I'm more than happy to come in and kind of share some of the things that I've learned about building marketplaces as a non-developer. I want to keep it short. First of all, a little bit about me. I run a freelancer marketplace in New Zealand called Unicorn Factory. I started it about 6 years ago when I was looking for freelance work myself, and I kind of felt like there was a real need for a localized version of something like Upwork or Fiverr. I don't come from a coding background, so I kind of had to teach myself how I could use some of the tools that we're going to be talking about today, uh, to basically build a basic MVP of what I'm doing. And now we are the biggest freelancer marketplace in New Zealand. Um, I also have a YouTube channel, um, because, you know, who doesn't nowadays? But I started my YouTube channel just to share some of the learnings along the way. And so if after this talk you're interested in learning more about it, you'll find a lot of resources on there. And then I also have a little bit of a community and mastermind where I teach first-time founders, get their MVPs up and running, but we can talk more about that later. And I live in Ottawa, Canada, but as you can probably tell from my voice, my accent, I'm actually from New Zealand originally. Now there's a lot to cover. There's a lot that you can dive into when you get into like no-code related things. So I kind of condensed it down to what I think are the most important things to know when you're just getting started. First of all, I want to just address straight out of the room the whole code versus no-code debate. There are 4 key reasons why I think no-code is the best solution in 99% of the cases. Um, then I want to also dive into the different no-code tools that I personally use for the Unicorn Factory that I think are the state-of-the-art tools. Uh, there's 6 of them, so I'm going to be walking you through each one of them. Then, um, one of the main concerns I hear a lot of people have about no-code is that there are certain limitations and you build a lot of features and all that kind of stuff. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a few examples of features that you can build with these no-code tools, and then I'm going to wrap it up by shouting out some of the people in my mastermind who come from a non-technical background and have built successful marketplace businesses. Okay, let's dive straight into it. So there are 4 main reasons why I think no-code is a better option for first-time founders when it comes to building your marketplace. Reason number 1, and actually one of the main reasons why people have come to me to build their MVPs, is if you hire developers to build your marketplace business, even if it's an MVP, you are going to be spending a lot of money. And it's not even really the upfront cost that should worry you. It's the having them on call that should worry you because You need a person, you're dependent on them, and it's just going to cost a ton of money. No-code, on the other hand, you know, you essentially just pay for the tools. So you can get away with spending anything between $200 a month to maybe $2,000 a month as you start to scale up during the MVP stage of it all. And so cost-wise, no-code doesn't really compare to code. The second part is, let's just assume that you that money or investing that type of money is just completely off the table, you have no access to funding, then the options are really, okay, should I go down the path of learning how to code or should I learn no-code? Now I have tried both. In fact, I actually started off trying to learn how to code because I was convinced that the only way I was going to get this platform up and running is by learning how to code, because all of the other big marketplaces like Airbnb and Uber Obviously did it with code. I was wrong. I tried a lot of Codecademy stuff. Look, we're going nowhere. It's a good path if you want to become a developer, but if you want to build an online business, I don't think you need to really get into the weeds as much. It takes a long time, and compared to that, no-code is, you know, whilst it still has a bit of a learning curve, it's a visual development tool. It's kind of getting like really good at something like Excel or getting good at fancy things that you can do in Google Slides and stuff like that. And so it does take time to get good at it, but the learning curve is significantly lower and therefore a way better option. The next thing is while you're in the MVP stage, you just need to move fast. You need to basically build something, bring it to market, get feedback from the market, and then go and make whatever adjustments you want. If you're working with a developer or a team, those feedback cycles and redeployment cycles just take so much longer. If you're the person in charge and in control of your build, you can get things out in 1-week, 2-weekly cycles, and you'll get feedback a lot faster. You can iterate a lot faster, and that will just make it a lot easier for you to kind of figure out what the right direction is for your marketplace. And then, I mean, I've said this like a few times, just speed is key here. And I think this is where no-code and code is a good option. And so the last thing that I want to say on this is that obviously if you are someone that doesn't come from a technical background and you don't have access to funding, this— these 4 reasons alone will pretty much be the main reasons why you should potentially look at no-code. But even if you are a developer, there are some pretty good arguments for using no-code tools just for quick prototyping. Because just the speed to get things set up just does not compare. Now, what tools do I use? Now, this is going to be contentious no matter like who you talk to in this space. There's so many different options out there and everyone will have their own preferences. These are the tools that I am currently using, and 4 out of these 6 tools were mentioned in the workshop that I did here 3 years ago. So my toolset has not changed a lot at all. I've added 2. One tool is Glide, which I use for all of my user accounts and my portals. And I use that because it's a lot easier, a lot faster. And then of course, AI tools, just because that wasn't even around when I launched the first version of the Unicorn Factory. Now, um, I am going to give you a quick little rundown of how I use these tools, why I use these tools. But at the end of this workshop, I'm going to leave a link to my website where you'll be able to watch a video where I go in depth into how I use these tools on my freelancer marketplace Unicorn Factory. So you can actually see the tools in action, so you can kind of visualize how they all work. But let's get into the first one. So the first tool that I use is Webflow. So Webflow, as some of you may know, is a very popular marketing website builder. Now there are a few things that I, uh, why I use it. First of all, visual development tool. I can see what I am building in real time. You don't need to write any code. It's beautiful. When it comes to marketplaces specifically, there are a few things that makes Webflow way better than say tools like Squarespace or Bubble or even like all-in-one builders. And number one is that it is amazing for SEO, and especially on the Unicorn Factory, but I think this applies to most marketplaces. Being able to rank well for search terms is key, and so you need the tool that you're using to create your marketing pages to have best practices implemented straight from the outset. And from my experience, Webflow does this better than anyone else. The next thing is their inbuilt CMS. Now, one of the key things that I've done on the Unicorn Factory that has really given me an edge specifically in New Zealand is that I can programmatically create thousands of unique landing pages. For example, for logo designers in Auckland, for Webflow developers in Wellington. And I was able to create all of these landing pages programmatically using automation tools and using AI tools. And that basically allows me to rank for all these long-tail keywords, which essentially leads to all this traffic that ultimately then ends up converting into freelancer signups and to client signups. So those are the main reasons why Webflow is the best tool. You also get a lot of design freedom, and it has really good APIs as well, which means that it will integrate with most automation tools that you use. The next tool that you're going to need is a database tool. Now, as you saw, I use 6 different tools, and that means that there's going to be data in a lot of different places. And one of the things that you don't want to have happen is that you've got some information in Stripe that is different in Webflow and that is different somewhere else. You need to essentially have one central source of truth, and the tool that I use as my central source of truth is Airtable. Now here's a screenshot of what an Airtable base looks like. This was for a different project that I worked on, but you can kind of think of Airtable as something like Google Sheets with a whole bunch of additional and advanced features. The way it works is you have your Airtable base, which in this case is— for my freelancer marketplace would be my Unicorn Factory base. And then within your base you have tables. So on the Unicorn Factory, I'd have a table for all of the freelancers that sign up, for all of the clients that sign up, for all of the interactions between clients and freelancers. And I control the flow of data from inside of Airtable. So you can essentially use it as your admin portal. Now I do go into this into more detail in the video that you'll be able to access afterwards, but it's an incredibly powerful tool and it's also very visual, which means that you don't need to, you know, worry about, you know, it being complicated to learn. It's kind of straightforward once you start working with it. Next, we need a tool that sends data from, say, Airtable to Webflow. So if, for example, a freelancer signs up, they send all of the information about their freelancing skills or whatever it is, and I approve them and I want to create a profile page for them in Webflow, if these tools didn't exist, I would have to basically go in and type in the name and upload the photo manually. Tools like Make.com allow you to do this automatically. Now, some of you may know Zapier. Zapier is probably another automation tool that is very popular and well known. Make is essentially the same tool. However, it allows for some more advanced workflows And it allows you, and it's also a bit cheaper. And so therefore it's kind of the best automation tool out there. Now I use Make to basically automate any kind of task involved in with the Unicorn Factory includes onboarding. It includes connecting clients to freelancers. It includes payments, anything that I would have to do manually. I can just plug into make.com and it kind of takes care of it for me. Next, I use Glide Apps. Now, when you run a marketplace or any business that has users for that matter, you need to allow your buyers and sellers to control the accounts. And this was actually a bit of a challenge. When I made this first workshop, I used a tool called Memberstack. Um, but Memberstack is a very, very technical tool and not particularly accessible for people who are just getting into using no-code tools. And so I found that a lot of the people that I was working with struggled specifically with Memberstack. So I went and did some research and I found another tool that is a lot user-friendlier, allows you to get started a lot faster, and allows you to create really good-looking user portals. And the tool is Glide. Now the beautiful thing about Glide is, uh, as you're building your Airtable database, you can actually use that database as your data source, which means you can basically take all of the information in Airtable and you can convert it into an app that your users can control. So what can they do with it? For example, freelancers, they can come in and upload portfolio items to be displayed in their profile. They can update their profile. Clients can create job listings. Clients can like get a list of all of the freelancers that apply for jobs. Again, I'd love to show you behind the scenes, but just for time purposes, I'm going to keep it short. But again, in the video, I dive into like very specific examples of that where I basically show you how it works. But Glide has been one of the tools that has been a complete game changer when it comes to streamlining my builds and just creating a really, really good user experience. For both the freelancers on the Unicorn Factory and clients. Next we have Stripe. Now, um, Stripe, obviously payment tool. Now here's the thing that I love about Stripe. They pretty much cater for all payment use cases that you'll encounter as a marketplace business. So the basic ones are one-off payments, subscriptions, but then specifically for marketplaces, there are also going to be use cases that are not commonly covered by tools that try to kind of create wrappers around Stripe. And those are, you know, when you charge commission or a transaction fee, you know, so clipping the ticket, usage-based pricing. Stripe allows you to do all of that, and you can actually just use the Stripe API and tie it directly into your user portals. So on the Unicorn Factory, my business model is a usage-based business, uh, usage-based pricing for freelancers. So they can essentially buy credits, and whenever I make an introduction or they receive a lead from a client, it uses up a credit. As soon as they run out of credits, they just go back to the payment portal, click the add credit button, and it takes them straight to a page like this. So it basically has all your bases covered when it comes to payments. And then of course, um, AI. Now, when OpenAI launched their API, I kind of played around with it probably the same way that a lot of you have as well, you know, creating content, blog posts, and all those kind of things. But then I actually came across a use case, um, that was really great for this particular thing, and that is creating job briefs. So whenever clients would post jobs to the Unicorn Factory, they'd write horrible job briefs. They'd write something like I want a logo. And then they'd post it like a 2-liner to our job board, and freelancers wouldn't want to apply for the job because it's too vague or it doesn't look legit or whatever it may be. And it's simply because the clients that were using the site may not have had experience with writing out a portal. So what I decided to do— sorry, writing a job brief. So what I decided to do is to create a tool They basically streamline the process of them creating a high-quality job listing. So what happens is they can just describe what it is that they're looking for. They can submit their company details, and then they can also set some preferences like their budgets, their timelines, all those kind of things. And then I use OpenAI to essentially create a job brief. Now, I do have a video on how that works. At the end of it. So it's pretty cool if you've never seen it before. I think a lot of marketplaces can solve for that particular use case. If not that, another use case is to help your sellers create super high-quality profile bios that has SEO benefits. It also makes your sellers look a lot better, and it just creates a better experience for everyone all around on the platform. Um, so again, check it out. I think even if you are building with code, understanding the workflows behind that will really allow you to build some pretty cool things. And that is actually the one feature that a lot of clients bring up when they reach out about the experience on the platform. Okay, the next part is, okay, one thing that I hear a lot of people when it comes to no-code is they're primarily concerned about the limitations. Does it scale? Can I do this? Can I do that? And whilst you are definitely going to run into certain types of limitations if you compare it to something like coding, What you can do with these no-code tools is usually way more than people anticipate. And so here are some of the key features that you could implement yourself. First thing is SEO-optimized programmatic landing pages. It's kind of like the starting point, I think, for most people. If you want to create hundreds of landing pages targeting certain keywords, no problem with no-code tools. Again, custom buyer and seller portals. This is something where if you did with developers would take forever. I whipped them up pretty quickly using Glide and no-code tools. Again, you can build AI tools into your portals, kind of what I just mentioned, but creating high-quality job listings, creating high-quality profile pages. Another very common use case I think for marketplaces is calendar bookings. So you can build a feature where you can integrate Cal.com into your marketplace platform. And this was actually created by one of the people in my community, Omar, who built a marketplace for tutors where people can just come and book in a session with a tutor, pay directly, and he clips the ticket on the transactions. Private one-on-one chats between buyers and sellers, also something that can be created. So if that is something you want to do, I just whipped this one up as a quick demo. I haven't actually integrated this myself just because of the nature of how my marketplace works. But if you want to keep all of the conversations between buyers and sellers in your platform, there are ways to do that. And then of course, all the marketplace payments that you might want to solve for. And those are the main ones that come up often. But beyond that, there are really so many other integrate— other ways that you— other tools that you can build. You can build little analytics solutions for your customers. You can set up all your transactional email workflows. You can even do some like automated social media content creation. So for example, if a new seller signs up to your platform and you want to create a little LinkedIn post about them, you can do all of that as well. And then another thing is you can actually tap— you can actually use high-scale databases like Supabase, which means that you'll be able to have thousands and thousands of records for messaging and all those kind of things. So you can really take these things quite far. Now at this point I was going to do a demo, but I made a video of the demo, so we're going to skip the demo. Um, but, and now I want to kind of show you some examples of some marketplaces that were built by some of the people in my community. Um, and again, all these people come from a non-technical background. So the first one is Omar. He, um, started working on Tutorlift about a year ago. He comes— he's from the consulting world, so he started at Deloitte and he basically gave businesses advice on how to like set up businesses like this, but he never created anything like this himself. And so he decided that he wanted to learn how to use no-code tools, and within a few months he had the first version of Tutorlift live. Now he's got processing A lot of bookings. I don't know exactly how many, but he's doing incredibly well with it. Michelle, she's a member of this of Everything Marketplaces as well. She created a managed marketplace called Reviews in Lusaka, Zambia. So basically, she helps home builders find vetted service providers. Again, no technical background, just built the MVP, started going out doing sales, and now she's kind of got glide portals. She's got all these. Make.com automations. She's kind of streamlined her business. She's got a team that helps her run the business, but yeah, she's killing it as well. Alex, who is actually a freelancer on the Unicorn Factory, he, he came from a Facebook advertising background and he had an agency that did renders for real estate agents. So whenever they want to sell a house or something like that, he would— his agency would do renders in their marketing. And so he decided that he wanted to build a tool that would help him get more leads, but also a tool that would help him promote his clients. And so he created townhouses.nz, and it's basically like a real estate platform where homebuyers, or like people who are looking for townhouses, can find all of the different townhouses that are on the market. Again, no technical background, created this thing, and now he uses this as a platform that generates him some good money, but it's also a great lead generation tool for his agency as well. Chive, which is a marketplace where charities in New Zealand can list themselves, and it just makes it easy for people to find causes and basically charities that they can support. Stephen, he— so Stephen and Alice, they both come from the social enterprise space. When they started no clue how to do it. They actually came to me after things went incredibly wrong with a developer. But now, um, Stephen runs an incredibly successful no-code agency. So, so this is how, you know, you kind of go from knowing nothing about no-code, and now he's, you know, selling people the no-code dream. Uh, then I've got like a bunch more examples I can go through. Like Brian here created— he's, he's, uh, he was a consultant in the publishing space, and he created a marketplace to help authors find assistants that were experienced in publishing and, and so on. So there are tons of them. And so the, the key thing is that, you know, all of these people kind of started from zero. So even if you're sitting there right now, you're thinking about building your MVP and you're like, I need to have a certain level of experience with these tools. No, you don't.

Um, it—

I, from my experience, it takes anywhere between 2 to 3 months to get to the point where you're really comfortable with these tools if you stick to working on specific projects and you have a bit of a plan to follow. Um, but once you get it out there, it goes pretty fast. And so I think I wanted to just share a few more key things that I've learned over the last few years of, you know, helping people set up their marketplaces, but also, you know, doing it myself. Uh, the first thing is, is that, you know, no-code tools still take time to learn. I feel oftentimes when people look at no-code tools and they compare it to code, that it's just a matter of sitting down, clicking a few buttons, and you're good to go. There's a learning curve involved with it. Um, I'd probably say if you're willing to commit a solid like month or 2 to getting the basics of building a landing page down, you'll, you'll get it, and it will be quite easy to kind of build from there. My number one recommendation for anyone who is interested in exploring it is just learn one tool at a time. Um, you know, like I've obviously talked about a lot of different tools here. I've, I've actually shown you 6 tools that I use, and One of the mistakes that people make is they try to learn all the tools at once, and it's confusing. Start off with one tool, get to like 80% good at that tool, and then it will become a lot easier to understand how all the other tools work. I recommend starting off with Webflow, learn how to build a basic landing page for your marketplace business, and then start, you know, building a database tool or CRM with Airtable. as needed. So I think that is something that is important. Another thing is I've helped a lot of people get their MVPs up and running. Some that have worked out incredibly well, others not so much. One of the things that I have taken away from the entire experience is that most marketplaces, no-code marketplaces that fail to take off, don't fail to take off because of no-code. It's usually you know, you didn't do the everything marketplaces school. You know, you need to, you need to get your basics right. You need to lay your foundations. And, you know, so no-code is not a shortcut or a magical tool in that sense that it will allow you to skip things like market research and all that kind of stuff. And also another thing, and, uh, this is just because I feel like it's useful to bring up, is if you are have perfectionist tendencies, these tools will drive you crazy. Okay, so if you've got a marketplace idea and you've got it all mapped out to the T in Figma, these tools will drive you crazy. Okay, so maybe if you're a bit of like a, you know, if you're just kind of like ship it and hope for the best type of person, you're gonna love these tools. Um, but yeah, I would definitely keep in mind that, you know, these tools, you know, there's some things that can come up sometimes. But yeah, that was pretty much what I wanted to say. I don't know how long this took, but I'm personally more looking forward to the Q&A stuff. So let's get into it. Awesome.

Well, I appreciate walking us through. So there's a lot of cool updates since your last workshop on that. So yeah, actually, I had one question to kind of start things off here. And that's, you know, when it comes to like some of the costs, like, can you give us like a general, I guess, like maybe just a sense and kind of like breakdown on what the costs are for the tool stack kind of in the earlier stages?

Yeah, so when I started the Unicorn Factory, I mean, the first tool that you'll probably want to pay for is Webflow. Webflow will cost you roughly $50 a month. So that's kind of like really the only tool that you need to get started. As soon as you start using Airtable, Airtable is about $20 a month, which can scale up to $49. And then tools like Make.com is also another tool where you'd start off at like say $20 and it would then scale up. So as you're just getting started, you can really get away with just spending under, say, $200 a month to basically have your entire infrastructure running. As things start to scale up, things get more expensive. So most of the automation tools that you'll use will start scaling up in price. The one tool that I use that is quite expensive is Glide. I mean, and I say relatively expensive, relative to all the other no-code tools. Uh, Glide costs me a grand a month. So, um, you know, compared to say like the $50 that I pay, uh, Webflow, it's obviously quite a bit more. However, the amount of time and money that Glide saves me, um, actually makes it a no-brainer. However, I would not start off with Glide. I would get to the point where you're business is kind of humming, just facilitate things manually first. And then as you need user portals, then you can start adding more tools and it will be easy. So I think from most of the people that I've worked with at the beginning, under $200, and then it can scale all the way up to a few grand a month.

I think we have some questions now. Hi, do you want to come on?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So you talk about the grant, one grant per month for Glide. What's the traffic cost? Is it just a starting price or after you scale up, usage-based? So Glide actually has cheaper plans. So if you wanted to have a play around with it, they have like a free plan and they also have like a $49 a month plan. For Marketplace specifically, you're probably going to have a lot of users and that is how they price their services. And so I'm on the enterprise plan and the enterprise plan gives me unlimited users. So a lot of the people that are just getting started with Glide, building marketplaces can get away with like a $200 per month plan. But once you start getting a lot of users using your platform, you're gonna exceed the monthly limit of how many users you can have, and you'll get onto the enterprise plan pretty quickly. I think one way that you can potentially overcome that in the short term is create a portal maybe only for your sellers but not for your buyers. And that might kind of keep you under the limit. But I've got a portal for my buyers and my sellers, and I also have like an admin portal for people that manage stuff for me. And so I exceeded the user count pretty quickly. And so that's why I'm on the $1,000 a month plan. And I think anyone who has like a validated marketplace that's got traction is going to end up on that plan pretty fast as well.

Thank you.

Good problem.

Thank you. Awesome. Yeah, feel free to use the raise hand if you have any questions, want to come on.

I was wondering, this is great. Thank you. First of all, I think it's really interesting to see the stack. If you are someone who is either short on time or realizes it's not a good use of your time to spend the time learning each of the tools and then doing it, you know, sort of integrating everything and you wanted to bring on a partner or maybe you have a co-founder, Do you, have you found in your experience that a product person is best suited for, for kind of the, you know, taking on the role of, of manually using these tools, or is it more of a developer, or would a developer more or less feel like, I, I code, this is, this is beneath me?

A lot of these tools have specialist freelancers that you can get. So let's say, for example, you wanna have someone who builds this out for you in Glide. Glide has their own little expert portal. And a lot of the times the people that are freelancers in that space come from a product design background in the first place, and they just use those tools because they can't code themselves. And so there's a lot of talent out there that will allow you to do a lot of the things if you want to bring someone on. I think in most cases it's actually good just to have specialists on hand for certain types of projects. So for example, if you need someone to create landing pages for you on Webflow, just hire someone who's really good at Webflow. I definitely wouldn't look for an all-rounder because, you know, jack of all trades, master of none is kind of very applicable in the no-code space. So I would probably say, hey, if you're at the stage where you are kind of building out your homepage, you want to do— have your programmatic landing page set up, hire a Webflow developer. If you want to start building out your user portals hire a Glide expert. And to be honest, there are some super talented people out there that charge a fraction of what, um, the developers would charge you. And, you know, as soon as you— you know how it is with freelancers, you know, as soon as you give them like a recurring revenue type situation, you know, they'll be there for you whenever you need them. So, um, the talent is absolutely out there that can basically allow you to do it. But the With that being said, once you do have it all set up, you'll kind of be in a position where you'll be able to make a lot of the changes yourself as well. So you don't have that constant back and forth where you need to spend a few grand on someone to fix some basic stuff for you. So it has advantages in both ways.

Thank you.

No worries.

Hey, Dimitri, do you want to come on?

Yes, thank you. I have kind of 2 questions for you. One, is there something that allows you to do reviews and feedback? That's easy enough to integrate. And my second question is, is there anything that allows you to do experiments? So say you have 2 versions of a landing page, you're interested in whether, you know, one copy works best. Is there anything that allows you to kind of gauge and measure the difference in the conversion rates?

Yeah. So 100%. So I have that on the Unicorn Factory. I don't have a rating system like Uber, but I do ask for feedback on you know, how the interaction went and all that kind of stuff. Um, you can just— so I think the simplest way to do it is to just send them a link to like a, an Airtable form or a Typeform if you're not at the stage yet where you have a Glide portal set up. But if you have a Glide portal set up, uh, you can just notify them, you know, whenever the job gets closed and then have a section in your app where they can leave a review for a freelancer. And so The way I do it is that when clients log back in, they can basically tell me whether or not I hired them. If they didn't hire them, they can tell me why not. And usually I get really good insights as to why certain freelancers are closing deals while other ones are not. And so yeah, if you do, if you have like an idea of how you want to set up a workflow like that, quite easy to like implement into a tool like Glide. Um, what was the second question again?

It was around like experimentation. So you have 2 versions of a landing page, you want to test the difference in conversion.

Yeah, so in Webflow you can definitely do that. I mean, the, the cheapest way to do it is to just use something like Google Optimize. So you just create your landing page in Webflow, plug in the Google Optimize script, and then you can test different landing page variations. Um, if you want to do some more advanced things, Webflow actually just launched a new set of features specifically around that. So there's a new feature called Webflow Optimize, and what it allows you to do is programmatic A/B testing or multivariate testing. So you can upload images and different texts, and it will just automatically create thousands of landing page variations for you. And they have inbuilt analytics to tell you exactly what is performing best, and it will then also kind of boost the one that is performing best. So kind of what you can do with Facebook ads is now built into Webflow. It is, um, like designed to be an enterprise feature, but, uh, yeah, I mean, like, if that's your jam, like, you can do it natively in Webflow now.

Thank you.

All right, awesome.

That'd be super helpful for us as far as creating, you know, something like marketing landing pages for, you know, categories and, uh, geos as well. So for sure. So you actually had a question in the, uh, in the chat. I think Denise is asking for, for Glide. Um, she's saying, can you build admin approvals, uh, when users are updating their profiles?

Oh yes. So I mean, I built an admin portal for kind of everything, I think. Uh, so approvals is kind of like the first thing that I built. Um, I built it in Airtable actually, and I just have a dropdown. And so, uh, basically they they sign up, they've— I've got all their profile information, and then there's a dropdown that says needs review, and then I can just go approve or rejected or waitlisted or whatever. And so it's just a matter— nowadays it's just a matter of like clicking a button. But I did that just in Airtable, but I built an admin portal in Glide as well, and that's been, um, made things a lot easier. So I've built the approval process into that as well. So now I get like a nice profile preview And I can just look at it and be like, would I hire this person? And then I can click approve or reject and it just triggers all the workflows that sends out all the emails and all that kind of stuff. Another few things I implemented into my admin portal that I don't know, I'm particularly stoked about is the biggest bottleneck that I have found is just support. And I'd get all these emails about, hey, why does this not work? Or, hey, my client ghosted me. Or, whatever it may be. And I now built a tool where I can actually just record my answer as like a voice note and it will automatically draft the email reply and send it to them. So I mean, you can really do some pretty epic stuff with these tools these days. And so yeah, maybe I'll— I might make a video about my admin portal in the future because it has been a massive time saver for me. So in short, yes, you can build admin approvals and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, that'd be, that'd be a cool video to see. So cool. Hey, uh, Jesse, do you want to come on?

Yeah, I'm not sure if this is a question, uh, for Connor or more, more for Mike. Um, I know in the, um, community we talk a lot about Sharetribe, and Sharetribe hasn't come up here as any of the stack. And I'm curious about, um, how to think about that. If, you know, and maybe that's because you started building a while ago and that wasn't available, but how do you think about that?

Yeah, so that's a good question. So Sharetribe was available when I started. There are a few reasons why I opted not to use Sharetribe. Now, don't get me wrong, Sharetribe is very great. I mean, it really comes down to your personal preferences. I mean, Mike built a massive marketplace with Sharetribe that he sold. So if that's your, uh, you know, if you've played with it before, definitely try it out. There are a few reasons why I don't like all-in-one tools, and that is that all-in-one tools limit you more than, um, individual tools that solve for certain use cases. So for example, Webflow is not trying to be everything. They just focus on making it easy for you to build the best marketing site possible. Uh, Airtable is not trying to kind of give you like allow you to build a website as well. It's just about, hey, let's be the best database tool. And I find that when you use tools that focus on being really good at one thing, you can solve for a lot more use cases. Whereas if you're using an all-in-one tool, you're kind of limited to the use cases that they've decided to solve for. Now I haven't used Sharetribe much, so I can't really comment on it. However, I have found with most all-in-one no-code tools, that is the exact problem that comes up, and that's the exact limitation that people end up dealing with. Another example of a tool like that is Bubble. So Bubble is another very, very popular no-code tool. Again, the main reason why I opt out of something like Bubble is simply because it has horrible SEO. You know, so it's like I don't want to— I rely on the organic traffic that Webflow will bring me. Um, which is why something like Bubble, whilst more functional than Webflow, isn't the right fit for what I'm looking for. So that is kind of how I look at all-in-one tools. But I always look at it also as, as like, what kind of examples of businesses have been created with these tools? And I know for a fact that people have built fantastic businesses with Sharetribe. People have built fantastic businesses with bubble. So it really comes down to what you feel you get the hang of faster and then just double down on those particular tools.

And if I could throw in a quick follow-up, do you think if you pick one path and it's not working for you, the cost of rebuild is super high or it's like, you know, just get started and you can always change later?

So that's a great question. I think that the main cost is time. To be honest. And so I've had a lot of people who have come to me who have gone down one path and then just decided this is not the way to go. Um, the way— and it's just part of it, you know, at the end of the day, um, something you, you kind of have to try something out to see that it doesn't work for you. But the way I like to do it is I just like to solve it on a use case by use case basis. So for example, my starting point is, okay, I want to build a marketplace. What is the first step that I should take? And it's like, I want to build a landing page so I can start promoting my marketplace, maybe get like some waitlist signups. Now, do I need a full-on marketplace building tool for that? No, I can fully get away with that just using Webflow. So that's where I start. Now I'm at the point where I've got a lot of traffic coming to the site, a lot of people are filling out my contact form. What's the next thing that I need? Well, I need to get organized. So maybe now I'll integrate a database tool. Okay, maybe I want to automate someone. And so you kind of add it on a case-by-case basis. And I think that makes using those tools a lot easier as well because you're kind of learning how to use the tools as you encounter bottlenecks and problems that you're trying to solve for. All of the bottlenecks and problems are hypothetically already solved in the all-in-one tools, you know. So that's why my preference is just like pick the best individual tool for the job at the time.

That's a good question. We could probably have an entire kind of sidebar conversation on different tools and platforms. So yeah, I guess I just want to kind of jump in here as well and also mention that I think it also depends on the specific type of marketplace you're looking to build and kind of, I guess, how far you are along in that process. If it's really just like an idea, a lot of, of course what Connor's mentioning is he's really focusing on like that validation, right? So how do you be as resourceful as possible by using some of these, you know, tools and platforms to quickly kind of spin something up to just kind of get as much, you know, make as much progress and validation as you can, right? So that starts with like a homepage, kind of starting to capture like waitlist, as he mentioned, while you're trying to, you know, then kind of, you know, further understand, okay, what's that next kind of need and kind of functionality that I need? But that's all kind of, you know, being derived from actual kind of user feedback. So I think that's key here. And, you know, that might not apply to all marketplaces that are like, hey, Maybe we're doing something else that might be more capital intensive or have other needs.

100%. That kind of sums it up as well. Yeah. Because you might not need messaging, for example, but now suddenly you've got a tool that doesn't allow you to disable messaging. So yeah, Mike, yeah, you kind of nailed it there.

I'll just jump in here too and also mention it from my own kind of experience, you know, building kind of no and low-code marketplaces, that it's actually very surprisingly, you know, very rare kind of when you come to the case where it's like, hey, this isn't possible. It's more so just thinking about like, not like what can we do, but like what should we do once you kind of have like initial traction and validation. And there's so many different kind of like creative workarounds that you can use. So there's pretty much a solution that kind of, you know, a lot of your problems. Unfortunately, most of them kind of start with, you know, doing the things that don't scale and kind of doing it manually. Then you can kind of figure out, you know, how you can kind of build it out and automate it from there.

And in fact, that's actually one of the key systems. So some of the marketplaces that I showed before that have done really well, They did all the stuff manually first. Like, that'd be like manually facilitating introductions between people. And then once they've done it so often that it starts to annoy them that they're doing the same thing over and over again, then they've got the exact roadmap for how the automated version of it looks like. People who end up not really going very far with it are always the people who have solved for every single use case before they've even launched their platform. Then people start log into their app for the first time and it's so complicated they don't know what to do. So getting into the mindset of building less is better is definitely something that will serve you long-term.

That's going to be a super helpful example. We're actually over time here, so I didn't realize it, but we dug into things. Thanks again for joining us for this and walking us through. This is a fun one. Thanks everyone for joining in the questions.