In this segment of a marketplace growth discussion, Speaker B introduces Nash (usenash.com), a platform that provides APIs to connect a wide range of local couriers and fleets with small businesses and app developers needing delivery services. The conversation highlights Nash's dual-sided growth playbook: a sales‑driven, city‑by‑city approach to onboarding supply‑side delivery providers, and a digital, category‑by‑category strategy to attract demand‑side partners such as florists, healthcare providers, and food services through API integration. The speakers emphasize how this combined geographical and digital expansion model enables rapid scaling in new markets without the need for the partners to recruit their own drivers.
You know, as far as on the note is, you know, copy and pasting and, you know, kind of the playbook and scaling in new markets, are there any recent examples of, you know, maybe earlier stage marketplaces you've seen or, you know, worked with or maybe, you know, advised that have done this really well and maybe sharing a little bit about, you know, what that playbook is like that they've used?
Yeah, definitely. Well, there's a couple of companies that we've invested in recently that I can talk about. So one that I love, and actually many of you guys may— some of you guys may even be customers, is a company called Nash. And what it is, is it's— let me just actually pick— it's like, basically, it's usenash.com. So I'll just—
I can put it in the chat right here.
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, there it goes.
Okay.
I found it.
I found it.
Yeah, exactly. It's this one. Yeah. And so what they do is they basically are— they've created a set of APIs and apps so that on one side of the network, it is couriers and fleets. So these are delivery folks, and think of this as the long tail of delivery providers that exist in every city. And so this is bike messengers, this is trucks with refrigeration in them, this is all sorts of people. And then on the flip side, on the other side, is basically everybody from florists and you know, small businesses, um, and also apps, right? So basically, if you wanted to add delivery to your app, you could implement them, um, in an API and, and, uh, integrate it into your app. And then that way you wouldn't have to recruit drivers yourself. Um, so that, that's another, you know, really, really good one. Um, and so, and so for this, uh, what I really enjoyed about it, um, you know, um, you know, the way that the founders talk about their business is It's both geographical and digital in its own way, because if you think about it, the networks on the supply side, on the labor side, which is the delivery, ultimately you actually have to go city within a city and just call down and basically just use sales. I think one of the things that you find about working with the hard side of the market is you often end up being very sales-driven. And so you're just calling, calling down, calling down all these, all these providers, which is, which is what the team's done. On the flip side, what you end up doing on the demand side is a lot of these are small businesses, a lot of these are apps, a lot of these are startups, and they exist not necessarily in a geography. Part of what they want to do is they want to build a new app that basically can deliver anywhere. And so in that case, you know, the You know, those networks are built on a sort of category-by-category basis, whether that's like healthcare and you're delivering COVID tests, or whether that's food and you're, you know, working with food delivery providers. There's kind of lots of different ways, but that's an example of a recent investment of ours that has approached it in a very interesting way.
Yeah, that's a great example. And when you mention, you know, being sales-led or sales-driven, you got quite a few nods here in the group chat.
I think a lot of us here can relate to that. Well, it's funny. I mean, I think we ended up talking about that at Uber all the time where we, the operating team that would basically run a city was kind of a trio of people. It was the general manager who oversaw the entire region. Then there was driver operations, which was basically very sales-driven, very hands-on, very quantitative. And then there was a marketing manager who tended to be more on the demand side. And that person tended to be much more broadcast and demand and social media performance marketing. And so I think that's one of the hardest things about marketplace companies is you ultimately have to master all the skills needed to be a successful consumer business and all the skills needed to be a successful B2B company. And then you overlay fintech and you also overlay international and you overlay all the other things. It's one of the most complex business models out there, which is part of the fun.
