Colin, Chief Revenue Officer at Outdoorsy and Roamly, breaks down the daily work of a CRO at a marketplace: balancing supply and demand, solving the chicken-and-egg liquidity problem, and using product levers like owner delivery to increase RV utilization and margins.
Chapters
So, you know, so what is, you know, what's a day-to-day like in, you know, your role as Chief Revenue Officer?
Yeah, I think that it's a little bit different than maybe like a B2B SaaS Chief Revenue Officer. You know, realistically, what I'm focused on a lot is unit economics of the business. I think marketplaces in particular, you know, you have phases, right? Number one is the chicken and the egg problem. Can you get liquidity in your marketplace and can it get going so that flywheel starts going? Great. You have transactions, you have all that, you've got some basic idea of how to grow, and you know you need to grow both sides, right? You know, at some point you get to scale where people want to throw fuel on the fire to make it grow really fast. And so at that juncture is where, you know, someone in the business really needs to start focusing on LTV to CAC and contribution margin. And so for us at Outdoorsy, I joined originally as Chief Product Officer. That's been my background traditionally. But after our Series C, really started focusing on unit economics of the business. And so that's what the role entitles. So very focused on revenue generation, but also driving margin and really segmentation of the business and thinking about the marketplace in a way where we can essentially drive margin from every transaction and do it scalably. So that's what I do on the day-to-day. And that's why I look at LTV curves a lot, but also on the cost side, right? And understanding which segments of the business drive value. I think I've said RV, right? So it just seems holistically, that's what we rent out. But RVs has many categories. You may or may not know this, but there's drivable RVs, motorized, you might call them. So like vans, the giant white boxes, all the different flavors, the Class A's, all those things, but there's also towable ones where you take your own car and tow it. And those 2 sets of, you know, just at that categorization behave very differently. And so as you get to scale in a marketplace, it really behooves you to start slicing and dicing your supply side to understand demand side, if it makes sense, to understand those revenue behaviors and cost behaviors within those buckets, because those will be your big growth levers ultimately for margin. and also for growth of the business is identifying which pieces of supply are underutilized. And ultimately, you may be able to build product to grow them faster. So for example, one of the things we identified looking at our unit economics is that trailers in the past converted not as well as motorized. People want to take camper vans out, right? And they can just show up and drive it away. Well, towable inventory may be great in Texas, but it's not great when people live in San Francisco and California and don't have a tow hitch, right? And so a big unlock for our business was how can we just get the owner to deliver it to you or to a campground or things like that? And so as you think about your business, it's how do you unlock from the product perspective more services and more value such that you can take this underutilized piece of supply, which most marketplaces have to have underutilization for them to exist, and make it more utilized.
