PeerSpace co-founder Dimitri describes how the company scaled from manual, local operations to a data-driven global marketplace across four phases: DIY supplier onboarding, centralized sales and multi-city launches, international expansion with legal and cultural adaptation, and finally a self-sustaining presence in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The company crossed $500 million in GMV and over one million bookings by shifting from spreadsheets to structured CRM processes and scientific experimentation.
Dimitri, do you want to come on?
Yeah. My question for you, kind of early on when you're talking about your growth expansion strategy, you said this wasn't scientific, and that's often the case. So I'm curious, at what point in your company's kind of development did you become more scientific? How did you make that transition? What did those first experiments look like? And kind of what do things look like now?
Great question. Yeah, I think of our expansion kind of 4 phases. The first phase is doing everything yourself in one market or a couple markets where you're, you know, you're onboarding the supplier, acquiring them, you're connecting hosts and guests together. By the time you've got like, I don't know, for us, 5 or so markets, we started to say, okay, well, we can't just have like a city team in every single market. That's not gonna work. how do we centralize some of these processes? And that's when it became much more important for us to, you know, move away from spreadsheets into CRM tools and, you know, create our sales pipeline for supply and start doing lead gen at a higher volume. The kind of that this is like our second kind of phase where we also saw Some markets, and I really think if you're a geographic-based marketplace, build some functionality into the platform that allows you to still take inbound from the markets in which you're not focused currently. We started seeing more hand raising in markets that we didn't think about that much, like San Diego was one that kind of launched itself. And where like there were like 50 spaces coming on, they weren't really driving much demand for a while. Then suddenly people started booking and maybe it was because people were kind of migrating down from LA for production shoots. But at some point we're like, okay, San Diego's launching itself now. Let's put some marketing effort and ops effort into like formally launching that. And so that's the second kind of second phase where you say, okay, let's launch a bunch of cities. At, at once. And here's how we do it. And it's like, for us, that's when we built a host acquisition team that was kind of all based centrally but had their own leads lists. We would kind of have them team up to do market launch functions and then kind of parachute into the next market and do that. We went through like a phase where we called Go National, which was about launching all those markets. And then the third phase is like, launching internationally. Things are very different when, once you decide to go across borders, there's legal issues, there's cultural considerations, and there's just like lots of hurdles to overcome. Your growth channels in the US, if that's where you're launching, may not carry over to France or the UK in the same way. And so for that phase, the third phase, I think it's, you almost take a small step back, but you retain this playbook that you have from your second phase of like kind of centralized and high volume leads because you want to launch faster. But you also go back a little bit to this local presence. So you want to feel local and credible to a new customer base that might see you as a foreign entity, right? And so for us getting a foothold into new markets, it was really important to show that and demonstrate like, yeah, there's these other competitors that we have that are based in your market that, you know, have been here for some time, but we actually have a team here and like we're gonna support you. And so those were some of the things that we were doing in our initial markets that we decided to do internationally again. And the 4th phase is be live everywhere. And I think that's something that you can do kind of at any phase. It doesn't need to be sequential to the last phase. It can be something where if you build like a good growth and referral strategy, you're building organic supply and that's ultimately gonna drive demand into the platform. And so, yeah, we're sort of, that's, that's the stage that PeerSpace is at now, live in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. And I think we said that earlier this summer crossed over $500 million in GMV, over a million bookings, largely in North America. But, you know, the new markets are also growing nicely for us. And it's, I wrote a blog post about this on Everything Marketplaces, you can check out about the learnings from international where I expand a bit more on like just, I think these are just considerations to make when you decide to expand to any new market. I've met a lot of founders who seem to be really eager to be like everywhere as soon as possible. And I find that problematic. I think that it's better to learn what you can and to really show growth and possibly product market fit before you even consider a second market. Or a second customer type that you're going after.
