Learnings From Starting 99designs & Hired With Matt Mickiewicz | EM Group Chat #199

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk about founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 199, which is a really great group chat just had with Matt Mikovich. Matt is a 3-time marketplace founder and previously started 99designs, Hired, and Flippa. In addition to all this incredible founder experience, Matt is also an advisor and investor in over a dozen startups. So it's a great chat with Matt. We went back to how he started 99designs and entered the world of marketplaces. He walked us through his experience scaling it and shared some of his key learnings. We spent some time discussing his journey with Hired and what some of the biggest challenges were. We also discussed lots of marketplace topics like the importance of frequency and AOV, dissenter mediation. Matt shared lots of tips for founders, and we also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. You're going to find it a great watch to the end. So Matt, you have some really incredible marketplace experience and have of course paved the way for us all building online marketplaces today. So I wanted to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to join us here as a special guest today. And we have a lot that we're going to dive into with all of your experience starting 99designs, hired in AppFlipper, but I thought it'd be great if you can start off by briefly sharing your background for those here that might not know you.

Cool. I live in Vancouver, Canada. I've been starting companies since I was 13 years old. I never had a job working for anybody else, even flipping burgers. By the time I was 16, I was fortunate enough to be able to buy my own car with cash. I became the youngest house buyer in Canada. 2 weeks after I turned 19, after my first big exit, which was 99designs, I started angel investing as well. I made 60 angel investments. 6 of those 60 became unicorns. And currently I travel the world and spend the remainder of my time a venture partner at Day One Ventures.

That's a really incredible background. So much we're going to get into here. As I, you know, also I mentioned to you, you know, we could probably have like an entire kind of group chat, you know, discussing each company that you started. So let's just kick things off though and jump right into it. So, you know, what are some of your key learnings from building marketplaces and, you know, piece of advice that you find yourself telling founders today?

Yeah, a couple of things. On 99designs, I think our real breakthrough was both the price point that we were able to hit compared to alternative solutions, as well as the fact that we made buying from us absolutely risk-free. So taking risk reduction to the maximum, like extend yourself, make it almost painless for somebody to say yes to buying from you. So before 99designs existed, basically I had paid $10,000 for a logo, The process took 6 weeks. I had 3 designs to choose from and that was it. After 99 designs, you get 100 logos to choose from. You'd only pay $300 and you get your money back if you hated all the designs. And the money-back guarantee was actually very frequently used. At times our refund rate was as high as 15%, but we were able to access a segment of customers that otherwise wouldn't have purchased graphic design services altogether. Are just made an absolute no-brainer for people to do business with us. On the downside, I think the challenge with 99designs was the average order value and the frequency. Over 7 or 8 years, the company and its teams iterated numerous times to try and bundle, upsell, cross-sell, but we were never able to significantly impact the repeat purchase rate and the average order value in a way that allowed the business to compound at 100% year over year. over a sustained period of time. So this was great value for end users, but it was not as frequent repeat purchase no matter what we did or what levers we tried to pull to come make this now billion-dollar outcome. On hired.com, I wrote a blog post about the downfall of this business called A Postmortem. And the challenge there was that we went from a transactional model where people paid for every hire they made to our SaaS model, including an unlimited hiring model. So pricing wasn't fundamentally aligned with value, which was the downfall of the business. The customers that were most profitable, they were most likely to churn. The customers that we had the least margin on, we retained them. And you cycle through that over 3 years and $100 million in capital, and you've dug yourself a really deep, deep dark hole that's almost impossible to get out of. I would say that's Another key learning. And then probably overall across all my companies, I just think the importance of hiring and hiring well is so, so important. It's not a skill that they teach classes on. There's not even that many great books about hiring people or interviewing people. Yet if your business finds product-market fit, that's what you're going to spend 30% of your time doing. You're going to be selling your company, but you're also going to be assessing people and making yes or no judgments. dozens of times a month potentially. And that's something that's really important to get good at if you hope to break out and go from a lifestyle business to a true breakout company that's hyperscaling.

Yeah, those are lots of great learnings and going to be kind of helpful advice for founders here as well. You know, if we do go back to 99designs because it was like one of the kind of early, you know, services marketplace, you know, what was like key for ultimately, you know, breaking through?

The business was actually incubated within my very first company, SitePoint.com. It actually started off within a bulletin board where people would simply post requests for design. Designers would compete by replying with their attached files, and at the end, hopefully one designer would be paid out. What happened a lot of the time is that people abandoned their contests, so designers would do all the work and no one would get paid out, which was frustrating. So we initially began by charging $10 just to post a classified ad, essentially. in this subforum rather than killing all of the activity. It continued growing exponentially. We went $20, then $40 to try and reduce the cases of abandoned contests. Eventually we decided that forum is a really bad way to have this experience as an end customer, and that we really need to spin it out as its own separate company with its own user flows. And that's what happened. But the kind of key insights, key moments there early on were just people Random companies and like dentists and makeup beauty parlors and book authors are finding this design contest subforum. We're buried within a huge web developer community. And like how they were finding it, it was like 5 clicks from their homepage. It was non-obvious. There was no help guides, no support, no marketing, but just kept growing. People clearly wanted this. We had hit the nail on the head accidentally with true strong product market fit. In our early attempts at basically killing this activity with $10, $20, $40 pricing, there's very little to actually mitigate the number of design requests that were posted to the community in its first couple of months.

Yeah, that's really interesting to hear about. A lot of founders here probably actually use 99designs as well. So that's really cool to hear about. So if we kind of transition into Hired, you know, I definitely want to spend some time talking about it because it's a very notable, you know, hiring marketplace. And you also, you know, raised quite a bit of capital and kind of blitzscaled. So could you take us back, you know, to the founding story and, you know, some of the first steps you took to start at the time?

Yeah, so basically the company started over beers and Indian food, 'cause many companies do in SF. We were lamenting about everyone's number one problem, which was hiring software engineers. And after a few more pitchers, we came up with this idea of auctioning people. So initial company was actually called Developer Auction. What if companies submitted a job offer before they interviewed you? What if you knew how much you were going to be worth before you spent 8 hours interviewing only to get a lowball job offer? We thought that would sort of shake the tree and increase the available supply of developers who were willing to engage with companies, having that upfront transparency on pricing even before the interview was conducted. It was super, super controversial. I remember grinding through hundreds of phone calls with employers who were telling me that They don't know what someone was going to be worth until they met them. And I kept telling them, like, so the spectrum of salaries in San Francisco is pretty broad. People don't want to spend 8 hours with you only to get an offer that's half of their current salary. So it would lose-lose for both of you. While you might not know whether this person is great before you talk to them, you do know what your budget is for your open role and how much you'd be willing to spend for the right person. Just be upfront of what your budget is, go through the interview process, and obviously if the person is not fit, you don't have to hire them, but at least you both set expectations upfront. So this tackled one of the greatest taboos in hiring, which is asking for salary. If an engineer or product manager or designer asks, you know, what's this job pay in the first 30 minutes of a phone call, often they were dismissed as being greedy, where in reality they were trying to align interests and prevent wasting time for both parties. So it was a very non-obvious but correct insight. It was a huge pull in the initial weeks and months and years even to get big companies to engage with this. So our early customers were primarily seed stage and Series A startups who were willing to try anything and everything they could to hire. And like 99designs, it was 100% risk-free. We didn't even send people a DocuSign contract. We didn't collect a credit card upfront. We had an approval process, but we saw that you were a legitimate founder in San Francisco that we could connect with on LinkedIn. All you had to do was click through our terms of service saying, I agree to pay 15% upon a successful hire through your platform, and that was it. So like we placed a great deal of trust in people, but also made it really, really, really easy to do business with us. And of course, like with 99designs, there were issues around nonpayments and cheating and disintermediation. and yada yada. But I think the net positives far outweighed the downsides of taking this very kind of open strategy to the marketplace and for making it easy for people to engage with us without going through redline contracts and long negotiations that happened much later.

Yeah, we'll definitely get into some of the challenges like disintermediation that you mentioned. But yeah, I'm glad you brought up the point as far as, you know, that initial kind of like offering that guarantee to, you know, help kind of build trust and attract. you know, the marketplace. And it sounds like, did you take like an initial, as far as like the strategy on focusing on the developer side or the talent side, you know, the quality of the developers?

The focus was on curated developer pools. So I would personally approve every single person that went live in the marketplace with a 5 to 10% approval rate. So most people were rejected because we wanted people to have a great experience. We wanted to have multiple job opportunities within days of being live on the marketplace, and that strongly correlated with our NPS scores over time. There was nothing more painful to a human's ego than spending 3 hours creating a profile only to have zero companies submit an interview request for you.

And also, too, you know, you ended up raising what I believe over $150 million in capital and then kind of, you know, blitzscaled to be one of the, you know, one of the largest hiring marketplaces, you know. So could you share a little bit more about, you know, moving from like finding initial kind of product market fit, you know, taking on that capital and blitzscaling?

Yeah.

By the time the company raised its seed round, which was at a $12 million pre-money valuation, I believe, We were already doing about $200,000 a month in revenue with a small team. So the company had gotten early traction right out of the gate because when you're charging $18,000, $20,000 or higher, the numbers add up really, really fast. And its first 12 months, the company went from $0 to $2.5 million run rate. Then we went like a $10 million run rate, then to a $33 million run rate in 36 months while I was the CEO. And we decided that we wanted to follow the Uber launch model of opening up individual markets by having a team of launchers who initially was Andrei Charou, who now runs a fund called Maple VC. We basically fly into New York, open up a WeWork, hire 3 people, train them and have them build that market and go and do it again in Chicago and Toronto and Seattle and Los Angeles, so on and so forth. So we ended up opening, I think, 15 different offices across 5 different countries. In a span of like 2 or 3 years, because we knew if we didn't, our competitors would go in and run our model in those markets successfully. And we wanted us to own this kind of category.

Worth noting the point in time, right, with competition.

So yeah, absolutely. We did have a bunch of clones and copycats, of course, BetterWe.com being one of them in the early days. AngelList also kind of entered the market with a very similar product. a year or two into it. And when Indeed failed to acquire 99— failed to acquire Hired.com, they launched a direct competitor called Indeed Hire, who would often set up directly across from us at all the major developer conferences, which was a fun strategy for them.

Yeah, I actually had a question for the group Q&A that you mentioned, the failed acquisitions that, you know, in your blog post, we'll probably get to that in a little bit. But, you know, a related topic as far as, you know, when it comes to, you know, I would say like, you know, taking on capital and kind of pursuing that opportunity when it's a very competitive space. You know, how do you advise founders think through this today? And, you know, maybe to kind of somewhat related to that is, you know, I would say like managing growth with capital efficiency.

I would say, you know, capital probably ruins more good companies than it creates. The income of the outcomes that investors are pursuing are not necessarily aligned with many founders, especially first-time founders who haven't had a prior exit. What could have become a great $30 or $50 million exit for a small team that would have been life-changing money It gets pushed into being forced a billion-dollar or more company in order to return the fund. The investors really don't care if you fail because it's all about the power law of returns. And you're always going to be forced to take more capital because it's really, really hard to pivot from burning $3 million a month to become profitable. You've set up systems, processes, hired people. It's a very, very difficult thing to do. So once you get on that roller coaster, it's And the one-way street for 80 or 90% of all businesses until the very, very late stages, of course.

Yeah, it's going to be helpful here for founders, especially since you've seen both sides of it.

Yeah.

Looking back now, you know, ultimately, like, you know, what worked and what didn't for Hired and what were some of your key learnings from your experience with Hired?

I mean, initially, I think the fact that we created a product that was so non-consensus, so controversial, was incredibly differentiated in the market, helped us get a lot of attention. I remember when TechCrunch first published a blog post called Developer Auctions Receives $24 Million in Job Offers in First Week. We got a lot of feedback, both good and bad, but at least people had an opinion. At least people cared. At least people knew we existed. That was incredibly, incredibly helpful, I would say. And we were able to play the PR angle for the first 2 or 3 years. So we only focused on hiring customer success and account management. Because all demand was basically inbound. The only marketing we had to spend was acquiring the developers, the talent, the supply in our case. And at one point we became the largest advertiser on LinkedIn in the world, spent $22 million a year on LinkedIn, but they wouldn't give us API access to grab profile data. So their ad sales team loved us and took us to Napa and did all that stuff while the CEO blocked us from Using their API, Civitas as a competitor.

Pretty wild to hear about that.

Yeah, got escalated all the way up to Jeff Weiner back in the day, and we couldn't get the deal, couldn't get API done no matter what, even when we offered millions of cash.

And then something else you mentioned, you know, previously as far as like, you know, frequency and of course, like, you know, Hired having a, like a very, very high AOV kind of compared to other marketplaces. So could you maybe share a little bit more about that and, you know, how you thought about that and how that also kind of factored into the economics and, you know, even marketing?

Yeah, I mean, initially I actually didn't even care about frequency of purchase because the average order value was so tremendously high. And I realized that hiring comes in waves and cycles. People raise a round, they hire 5, 10, 30, 50 people, then they go into ingestion mode for a couple quarters, slow down, and they might pick up hiring again after they raise more rounds. So looking at retention in the traditional SaaS way for recruiting doesn't really make sense. The behavior is going to vary dramatically across companies. I think a much better metric to focus on in hindsight would be share of hires, like, or share of wallet in a way, like of a company's hires, what percentage come through Hired.com versus other sources and how do you push that number up to 100%. So when they do have that need, they use us almost exclusively. We did not focus on that metric for full disclosure, but I think that would have been a much better end goal than focusing on client retention, though we did do a lot around client activation. So if we see an employer log in and browse 50 profiles and not request interviews with anybody, our account management team would call them and be like, are you either contacting these developers off platform on LinkedIn or are you not actively hiring or what's going on here? And we'd obviously disable accounts if people were doing that over prolonged periods of time. Yeah.

And another kind of related topic to that, as you're kind of— it sounds like you're alluding to, is disintermediation. Right, which is something that we're always discussing here in the community as marketplace founders. So, you know, how did you think about disintermediation there and kind of, you know, overcome some of those potential challenges with it?

Initially, we didn't think about it at all. We just wanted to see if people would look at developers, give them job offers upfront without interviewing them, and whether some of those people wound up getting hired, right? That was the first test of this being a legitimate marketplace that generated revenue. Over time, we got a little bit more sophisticated in disintermediation tracking. We have view logs, so we do audits. We built bots that would track job changes of candidates who went live on our marketplace. And then if they got viewed by somebody who they changed jobs to, obviously we'd flag that and investigate. On occasion we'd collect. Honestly, it was a relatively minor problem. We're dealing with well-funded startups who are not necessarily incentivized to cheat, save a $20,000 invoice. Their problem was finding 10 engineers, not saving the money. Obviously we had bad apples and some fun stories there. But it was not a big focus despite our investors constantly asking about it.

Definitely, definitely varies to the degree some marketplaces kind of face, you know, compared to others.

One thing I should touch on upon that was really important for Hired and developer options early success was the concept of time-bound auctions. So rather than having a marketplace that was evergreen, always on, we had this concept of batches with 150 curated developers. They would live live on our marketplace for 1 or 2 weeks. You either request an interview with them during that time or you never saw them again. There was literally a countdown timer on our site. Occasionally we'd extend it, then we'd do emails to employers saying you have an extra 72 hours or 24 more hours to engage. But it was this pressure and fear of missing out that built a habit over time. So we would see companies on the East Coast Recruiters waking up at 3 a.m. to be the first one to submit interviews to developers when they went live for the first time because they knew they had a higher acceptance rate and they'd be more successful versus competitors if they got in there early. And over time, that became a really, really big part of the marketplace and something that was very unique from every other recruiting marketplace, which didn't focus on intent. All the marketplaces were like, here's cool people, look at them. Maybe 5 or 10% will respond. Maybe 5 or 10% of those are hireable. So we're like, hey, these people are active in the market interviewing right now. Hurry up, go get them or they're gone.

Now, that's really interesting to hear about. Definitely. It sounds like it creates a sense of urgency too, also to, you know, kind of considering availability for candidates as well. So I wanted to transition into talking about AI because it's an exciting time in the world of, you know, marketplaces right now. And also, too, you know, it's worth noting that, you know, you've seen the, I would say, like evolution of kind of like, you know, marketplaces over time from the early, early days. So, you know, how are you seeing AI impact at marketplaces? And are there any maybe specific opportunities for marketplaces to leverage AI that you're excited about?

I mean, I think most businesses will leverage AI where it makes sense, but I don't think saying you're an AI marketplace is that interesting. It's like saying you're a dot-com company or a cloud company or a mobile company or on-demand company. At the end of the day, what really matters is whether you're solving a customer problem in a defensible, sustainable way that they're willing to pay for. Customer service is obviously one where that's relatively easy to implement AI in and create a radically better experience with fewer staff. Obviously, if your engineering team isn't using AI, you're probably leaving a lot of productivity on the table. Your product managers can use the AI tools to do mockups and wireframes and conduct user interviews before you build anything. So it should make your product managers much more effective as well. On data analytics, obviously, some fantastic things you can do there for ingesting lots of data. If you're dealing with contracts, there's fantastic tools like Spellbook Legal out there for $299 a month that can save you thousands of dollars in legal fees. So everybody should be using AI where it makes sense. But at the end of the day, you can be like everybody else, like you have to do it to keep up.

Yeah, definitely. I think that's what we need to hear here. So, so, well, cool. And then, you know, something else that I wanted to discuss is, you know, specific opportunities maybe for hiring and kind of services marketplaces. So are there any maybe applications and like opportunities right now that you see in this space?

I think the big marketplaces over the last 2, 3 years have been the ones that do training for AI models. So Merkur, Scalar, even Handshake has pivoted from college recruiting into AI training. I think it's an interesting opportunity and there'll be a bunch of specialty marketplaces that launch in this sector. I know somebody is doing like AI training for financial models, for example, and they're paying workers $150 an hour to perform certain tasks and label the data for AIs. I'm not sure what the long-term outcome of these businesses are when we get to AGI here in the next couple of years. Like, what does the next wave look like where these businesses die off? But in the short term, it's a huge cash cow opportunity. Simply because the LLM foundational model companies are loaded with cash and a willingness to spend money to acquire unique datasets.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be interesting to see how it starts to kind of shape up and play out. So, and a fun topic here, we're going to get into the group Q&A a little bit, but, you know, a fun topic that I wanted to ask about here is, you know, around some of the biggest mistakes. And so, you know, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see founders make when building marketplaces today?

I would say it comes down to the same mistakes people make when building companies altogether, right? People sometimes get attached to their idea and spend more time working on it when it doesn't work. You know, this persistence and perseverance is super important. There's going to be dips, but you know, sometimes companies just don't work and you're always going to be a $5 or $10 million company. If that's not your vision or ambition, then it's time to move on. So I've seen people, you know, take out credit card debt, stop paying themselves for a year or two, When it's clear an idea is not going to work out. And that's just really sad to see. Number 2 is recruiting and management. Like, people generally build companies because they like solving a problem, or they're passionate about an industry, or they like coding, or they like sales. But few people like being people managers. But as you scale up your company, this is something you have to like spend a lot of time focusing on so that your skill set scales with the company. As you grow from 50 to 100 people, does your average productivity per team member decline by 50% or 90%? And that's all up to you as a founder. Are you able to fire the bad apples that made mistakes when you've made those? Are you able to reorg the company based on the new talent you've hired, give people the right level of responsibility, layer in people? So some of the early hires you made might not be in the right seat going forward. Are you able to recognize that and fix that before it becomes a problem for your company? All the standard stuff like it. And I have a bunch of books I recommend on the topic from High Output Management to The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. High Growth Handbook by Eliot Gill touches on some of this stuff as well. But a lot of people just don't like people, don't like this task. Thinking about org charts is not sexy. Find somebody who's not comfortable admitting that you made a mistake, taking one of your founding engineers and then who got the CTO title and demoting them is not pleasant, but sometimes that's what needs to get done. And those are the things that often make or break companies.

Yeah, certainly. This is going to be super helpful. So I was going to ask, next question is kind of tips before we get into the group Q&A, but you included those in there as well. So that's going to be great. So, so cool. On that note, we're going to get into the group Q&A. So if you had a question, feel free to use the, you know, the Zoom raise hand at the top, and that way I can kind of call on you to But I actually had a question that I wanted to ask for a founder here first, and then we'll get to some others. And it was Blake asking around, you know, how you evaluate marketplaces when investing, you know. So what is there, you know, maybe specific things that you look for in founders and marketplaces when investing today?

Because we invest in the early stage, it's really about looking at people who are founder mode, who are determined to succeed, that are willing to push a rock uphill for many, many years. chew glass and stare into the abyss for a long, long time in order to build something successful. The market opportunity almost doesn't matter if you have the right person, they'll figure it out.

That's gonna be helpful. Hey, Peter, saw you raise your hand. Do you want to jump on here?

Yeah, absolutely. Love the point on chewing glass. It's nice to hear. And so, Orange Owl Marketplace, we think very highly, like very much about Quality assurance on the supply side.

Yes.

What have you found that works well and like how do you approach that quality management in supply?

Great question. So initially we just threw people at the problem. At our peak, we had 7 human curators that were doing nothing but reviewing profiles and manually determining who would be a good fit for our marketplace. We actually hired people out of college admissions because they had the ability to kind of grind through this very monotonous work for long, long periods of time. And then at the end, we would actually have a review cycle. So we would analyze how accurate their predictions were around who is going to receive interview requests from our employers and want to use that to kind of improve their creation going forward. As a marketplace in home care, which I guess is what Criticult is, it really comes down to to the people component, right? You're sending people into others' homes. Do they get along? Do they have manners? Do they have skills? Do they show up on time? Are they there for as long as they say they're going to be, right? Cheating, fraud. It's a really interesting set of problems to solve for. Be curious to chat about this separately, but—

Awesome. That's a great question. Well, hey, Danny or Pokken, feel free to come on here. So I know you added questions.

I have a question similar to that as well. So, uh, made a lot of sense what you were saying about making it a no-brainer for people to use your service. And I was curious from that, like, what did you see were still the biggest points of friction, um, despite the money-back guarantee? And how did you address that? And then also, how big of a war chest did you have to have in order to give the money-back guarantee?

Well, we had money-back guarantee for both Hiredo and 99designs. So for 99designs, I mean, it was 10-15% refund rate. So we were just doing it out of revenue, was a non-issue for us, just basically a cost of goods sold. For hire, the refund rate was much, much smaller because it was a 90-day guarantee if they fired somebody that they hired from our marketplace and that they weren't happy with. Again, it was a bit of a rounding error for us. It was like 3 or 4% generally and sometimes less. So we were, we have already gotten paid by them. So refunding it or giving them a credit for future purchase was not an issue, but really made a big difference. But yeah, I mean, even with all that, people still in some cases were saying, not hired. All your developers are greedy. They're optimizing for maximum salary or looking for missionaries, not mercenaries. Obviously for many, many years we dealt with, we don't want to disclose our salary and how much we pay because we're a special unicorn and people will work for peanuts and pocket lint, right? Took us like 4 or 5 years to get Amazon as a customer, Wayfair, et cetera. So bigger companies came on board, but we had enough of an early adopter base who were willing to try anything and everything, including disclosing salary details upfront in order to build momentum in the market base and to go from that $2.5 to $10 to $33 million run rate.

Hey, Matt, I actually had a question that was added and it was somewhat related to this as well. which is around, you know, marketplaces when they think through like category expansion. So you mentioned, you know, what you initially started with as far as on the job side. But, you know, how did you think about expansion and, you know, when to expand, when the right time was?

Yeah.

So expansion tied directly into our PR strategy. So every couple of weeks we launch a new market. Hire.com launches New York, Boston, Chicago, etc. And each of those was a big PR blitz. And then we do category expansion. So we launch data scientists, designers, product managers, We even tried salespeople at one point and kind of branched out that way. So geographic expansion was the primary thing, but then additional types of talent and job titles.

Yeah, as I mentioned to you, I was actually in the talent hiring space myself. So I remember just always seeing, you know, hired everywhere. So at the point in time. So cool. Hey, Danny, saw you raise your hand. Do you want to come on?

Yeah, great to hear from you and to learn from you. I'm building a marketplace in this space myself. So it's super Super excited to learn from you and thanks for taking the time. I guess I wanted to ask you your thoughts on, it feels like search is like the one thing that has been really difficult to solve for kind of service-based marketplaces. I think the thinking so far has been, hey, like that's gonna be like the one thing that AI's gonna revolutionize. Just wondering whether you've seen any examples of like marketplaces in the space that are doing things really well. I guess it's a bit of a loaded question because I've heard the theory, but then when looking at the practice and seeing the products that are out there, I haven't really been super impressed by any of the new experiences I've seen.

So curious to hear. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example of a product in recruiting. There's a company called pin.com. It's not a marketplace, but it's just a people search tool. And what they've actually done is augment people data through an LM. So they're able to make a lot of inferences and expand the searches that user comes— that person comes up for just by using Gemini, which was really interesting. So I mean, this is a case where your LinkedIn profile or your resume is probably like not accurate or not a complete picture of who you are, but it's enough data for an LLM to answer dozens of questions around that person. And the answers to those dozens of questions make for a much more comprehensive profile, which leads to a much better search experience. That's an interesting example of that, is that can you run certain datasets through an LLM to fill additional data fields and expand? A bunch of stuff, right?

Cool. So we're almost out of time here, so I definitely want to make sure that we can kind of wrap things up here. But yeah, Matt, I really appreciate, you know, taking the time to join us here. So you, of course, paved the way for us all building online marketplaces today. And this is a real treat, you know, hear about all of your, you know, experience, some of the, some of the stories kind of going back and also to, you know, key learnings that you're sharing with us all here. So I know you shared some awesome, awesome blog posts and they definitely aged well. And I feel like we're still kind of, you know, hitting on some of those kind of key points and learnings that you're sharing. There's still the fundamentals for building marketplaces. today. So super helpful. And, you know, really appreciate it once again. And then I wanted to ask my final kind of parting question that I typically ask, which is, if you could go right back to before you started 99designs and entered the world of marketplaces, you know, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces specifically?

They're damn hard. They're damn hard.

We can all relate with that. So it's gonna be a fun kind of ending to it. So we once again really appreciate it. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug. Where can we all keep up with you at?

@MattMitskevich on Twitter. My blog, I update once in a while with interesting things I read, mattmitskevich.com. LinkedIn is fine as well.

Awesome.

I'll be sure to include links in the recording to this. I'm sure you'll have lots of founders coming your way. So we once again really appreciate it. And thanks everyone for joining in the great questions today.