Peerspace shifted from taking commission only from hosts to splitting fees between hosts and guests, then added a concierge service connecting guests with vendors and let hosts sell add-ons directly. The challenge was balancing monetization across both sides of the marketplace without losing either frequent hosts or occasional guests.
Chapters
I'd love to learn a little bit more about, you know, how monetization and, you know, the revenue might have, model potentially changed, you know, through PeerSpace as it evolved. And then I was also, I noticed too, you also of course have like add-ons and kind of services additionally with the spaces. So could you maybe share a little bit more about that and, you know, what point in time you introduced that?
Definitely. So I'll go, I'll start at the beginning in terms of how we decided to create our revenue model. And we thought we were really bringing the most value to our supply. And at the time, you know, Airbnb was probably the most established marketplace, the most similar one in our space, and all their fees were on the guest side and hosts paid very little. I think they still do, right? But for us, we're like, we're going to market your business for you. You don't have to do anything that's worth That's worth something. That's where the value creation is happening. So we're gonna take a commission from that side. And so we introduced the host service fee as the most heavily weighted side of our revenue model. And, you know, it was, that was kind of, I don't know, new or new. It wasn't like common thinking at the time, but we decided to go with it. And I think it made the most sense for us. And it ended up being beneficial because we also had opportunities to monetize the demand side, particularly all the customer support that we provide them, guarantees, you know, chargeback protection, things that we ultimately help the hosts with. But we realized we needed additional tooling. And so anyway, our take rate ended up getting to a certain percentage. And it became a mix of host and guest fees, somewhat split towards the end, I would say. And so that was the first kind of foray into monetization. I think we got a lot smarter about it over time. We built in kind of variable pricing models on fees depending on how much the, what the ASP of the transaction was. We decided to, we, at one point we had a concierge service is what we called it, which was the Peerspace team connecting guests and their companies with vendors that could host like catering or talent or, you know, DJ and whatnot during the booking and charge, we charge a fee for that and we would work with preferred vendors that knew how our platform worked. And we're generally going to create a good experience when entering the host spaces. And then at one point, we ended up building an add-on system so hosts could offer their own add-ons. And that was a way that we could monetize the experience and ultimately go beyond just creating a space opportunity for them. We want our, our guests to have memorable moments. I think part of that is making the planning process really easy. And so if the entire event can come together, that was our goal. And so, you know, that's where add-ons came into play. And yeah, lots of monetization strategies come up when you're also trying to think about like, how, what is the, what is our optimal value offer here? And, you know, is there smart ways to do it, which You've got 2 sides of the marketplace. You've got your supply where you're, you know, those are your most frequent customers, right? Because they're using you all the time. And then you've got your demand, which come in less frequently. And there's just like lots of ways to think about how you want to structure your pricing and how you want to evolve it over time to provide the most, maximize the value you're providing to your most loyal customers.
