How Winnie Took The Approach Of Going Broad Across Markets

1 May 2024 · 2 min

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In this interview, the speakers discuss Winnie's unconventional go‑to‑market strategy for its childcare marketplace. Rather than starting in a single city and building supply‑demand liquidity gradually, Winnie imported childcare provider data state‑by‑state across the United States to quickly establish a comprehensive directory and gain early SEO and domain authority. This broad rollout surprised VCs, who questioned the feasibility of covering every state at once. Because the initial product functioned as a utility directory, provider onboarding was not required early on. Over time, Winnie shifted its business model to focus on daycares and preschools that pay for leads, moving away from a pure transactional marketplace. The company now targets specific low‑liquidity areas to recruit more providers, but the initial strategy was to launch everywhere in the US as fast as possible.

Chapters

Since Winnie sounds like a somewhat kind of local marketplace in nature, you know, at that point in time, you mentioned being in San Francisco. Did you kind of constrain markets to kind of build up liquidity or?
No, not really. Like, I think that's like the common technique is like you start really small and you make sure you have really good kind of supply dynamic, demand dynamics, and then you go bigger. We, because our thing was like a data import, we kind of moved quickly to do it state by state. And, you know, VCs don't really love this. They're like, what do you mean you did this for every state? And we're like, well, we have an SEO play here. So we want to kind of be first in getting this data and building up kind of our domain authority. And because we didn't need the providers on the other side in the beginning, and it was just kind of this utility, this directory, we could just kind of do it ourselves everywhere. But as we have kind of focused on bringing the providers on, which is now our entire business, like it's the daycares and preschools who pay us. We're not a transactional marketplace where kind of a lead gen-based marketplace. So we do focus more now on like, there are specific areas where we know we have low liquidity and we want to get more suppliers on in those areas. But in the beginning, we were just like, let's go everywhere really quickly, US only, but