How Bounce Manages Marketplace Liquidity Across 2,500+ Cities

16 May 2024 · 3 min

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3:16

In this interview, Bounce’s co‑founder (Speaker B) recounts how the company’s rapid expansion was tested by the COVID‑19 pandemic. In 2020, Bounce lost about 99 % of its revenue and many partner stores, creating a severe liquidity imbalance between supply and demand. To survive, the team invested heavily in long‑term infrastructure—building SEO capabilities, language translation, internationalization, and even re‑architecting the codebase. They also created a proactive store‑engagement system: when a partner store received its first booking after a 30‑day lull, a support team member would call the store to confirm readiness and re‑educate staff if needed. This helped maintain partner satisfaction and prevented poor customer experiences. Simultaneously, Bounce continued to acquire new supply across Europe, despite the uncertainty, using the newly built tools to manage onboarding. The experience gave Bounce a crash course in marketplace liquidity, teaching them that balancing supply and demand requires both technical foundations and hands‑on operational tactics.

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with that expansion into so many markets, I can only imagine, you know, how challenging it is to kind of manage liquidity. But, you know, were there any big learnings or lessons from doing so as far as like when it comes to expansion that you could share with us here?
A really big chapter of the Bounce story was going through the pandemic. So 2019 was an awesome year for us. 2020 started great and then the pandemic hit. It wiped out 99% of our revenue. We lost a ton of stores. It was like, It was like reversing a lot of the work we had done. So it was really challenging, but, you know, myself and the early team members, we just had this big vision for what we could build and what Bounce could become. We said, you know, we're going to keep our foot on the gas and build this as big as we can. We built a lot of our SEO infrastructure, language translation, internationalization infrastructure. I think we even re-architected the codebase during that time. Just all these things to really make the ship really solid. And then when things really started coming back, we just grew incredibly fast. But there's some key stories in there about liquidity. So yeah, the topic of marketplaces, you know, they really only work if you have supply and demand balanced. Now we had, you know, all of our demand went away. How do we keep these partners happy? How do we keep these partners engaged? One liquidity issue that we saw during the pandemic was folks' stores might not have seen a bounce booking for a few months. And then, you know, these are small businesses or hotels that might have new staff every few months or a new team member. And so someone would come into, someone would make a bounce booking and they'd show up to the hotel And then they would say, oh, what's Bounce? And we're like, no, no, like you represent Bounce. Don't let a— that's a bad customer experience. And so we had to think really strategically about that liquidity problem. And so because our volume had fallen so low during the pandemic, what we did was we built these notifications where if a store got their first booking in 30 days, We would have customer support, which was like one of the 5 team members at the time, call the store and say, hey, you guys have a new booking, are you ready for it? And if they were, all good. If they weren't, then we would reeducate the store or the new employee before the customer showed up. So that worked really well. And that also allowed us to keep our foot on the gas with supply acquisition. We were building all this long-term infrastructure, internationalization. We were expanding our supply base. across Europe during the pandemic. And basically that would've all been futile unless we had built these tools. So signing up all these stores during the pandemic was difficult because it was like doing so with a blindfold. You don't know if it's the best supply, they might not get a booking for a while. So I would say we definitely got a crash course in marketplace liquidity by continuing to push Bounce during the pandemic.