How Outdoorsy Bootstrapped Marketplace Liquidity By Building A SaaS Offering (Colin Chat Clip)

So kind of like going back though to the earlier days of Outdoorsy, I'd love to learn a little bit more about maybe how it's kind of evolved as you guys have scaled. And also too, I did want to ask about specifically Wheelbase Pro, which is kind of like your SaaS offering, if we can maybe learn a little bit more about that.

Yeah, of course. So I think there's always the chicken or the egg problem in the marketplace, right? Do you start with the supply side? Do you start with the demand side? And honestly, how do you bootstrap it? No matter how much money you have or all these things, it's— you want to show up to a party where there's people at the party, and that's the problem to solve. And so I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. You can try and start with the peer-to-peer side of it. What are the inherent advantages of that? Those people do want to rent their supply out. Inherent disadvantages are they're very disparate and they're one by one. And they're not necessarily running a business today. One of the advantages of going after the people that already are running this business, they're basically doing what you want to do with your marketplace, is that A, they have a lot of supply, B, they don't necessarily need your business to be interested and to keep them alive, right? And C, they're running like a service, so they tend to be higher quality in general in terms of They're running a business, so they want to have repeat customers and great experiences. And so one of the things that I would stress that was successful for Outdoorsy was building this software, which is free for the use, or it has been in the past, for people that were running their fleets to essentially have management of their fleet, booking engines, websites, all of it, but then also to be able to put their inventory on Outdoorsy and get bookings. And so what that meant for us was that as you drove demand, you already had supply on that was instantly bookable and readily available and high quality. But that also meant when we started advertising the peer-to-peer side, they showed up, there was already inventory on the site, and therefore, you know, they felt like this was trusted and something they could, you know, want to be a part of. And we had sufficient demand to, you know, continue to bootstrap it. So I think as you, you know, founders of marketplaces, that to think of, you know, strategically, what's your wedge of how you get it going? Because I think that's the key, the chicken or the egg problem, as always. And you have to, I think, line up with your marketplace in particular and the dynamics around it and think about how to go after it. So a big thing I would also say is that insurance wasn't a thing for people that were renting their own RVs out, and they were doing it on Craigslist. They didn't necessarily have rental period insurance available. If they did, it was very expensive. And so a big unlock that we found, in particular for the peer-to-peer side, was us providing the insurance during the rental period. And doing that was essentially the liquidity unlock so that people could make bookings, trust that their RV, if it got in an accident, would be covered, and realistically create that liquidity in the marketplace that can allow demand to thrive and then help the business grow.