Max Brun discusses expansion strategy for hyperlocal marketplace founders. Key advice: move fast instead of waiting for perfect data, repeat a proven playbook across new markets, and use product and brand tactics like TV ads to sustain growth at scale.
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How have you guys thought about expansion in the past? And, you know, do you maybe have any kind of tips for early stage, you know, hyperlocal marketplace founders when it comes to, you know, playbooks or expanding into new markets?
Yeah, I kind of go back to the getting the playbook right. Like, you know, it's, I'm a believer that in companies you're never gonna have perfect data, so get enough and just move. I'm somebody that's all about action and my wife's a little different. She's like the 4.0. I'm gonna analyze and then I'll move. By that point, I'm already like, 10 clicks ahead. And there's just different ways to attack things, but I tend to learn through action. So I'd encourage everybody, like, get enough data and just get going and start tracking and go, that didn't work. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Because startups are about speed and execution. And the more you sit there just kind of circulating, the less time you're learning. So I believe in just kind of getting out there. And that's how we, that first year, figured out that playbook. Once we kind of figured out that playbook, We just kept repeating it every market we went to. We said, okay, repeat, repeat, repeat. And so that eventually worked for a long time until it kind of didn't. And then it was, well, how, what else can we do? So like, we never ran TV ads until in the last year or so, like, now we're doing different types of branding. And part of the reason is because half the country has installed OfferUp. We've been installed 130 million times now. And so, you know, how do we get back to what I said about, Like Seattle, okay, a quarter of adults use OfferUp every month. That's great. That means 75% don't. Well, why don't they use it? Well, maybe they forgot about it or they didn't find the thing they want. So now we're building other things in the product. So there's more reasons to come back, right? So you have to think about, and that's how I would always think about it is, okay, you're, it's kind of called this J curve, right? Like, what are the things that are working well? Okay, great. But eventually they don't always work. And then you have to start to think of planting seeds for the next thing that's going to continue to scale you. And I think companies that are able to do that well as they get bigger become really big companies, right? Like Facebooks and the Amazons of the world. Like, I've always thought Amazon is like the most crazy company to think about because the amount of different businesses and the things they've done. I mean, there's a lot of business decisions that could have gone extremely wrong in that company and somehow they've navigated extremely well. But I think just, you know, have a framework and be willing to test against it constantly and question your own hypotheses all the time because things will change. Like the same thing that's working may not be working in 24 months.
