Nick Huzar advises Sarah, who built a bridal peer-to-peer marketplace, on which metrics matter early on. Track your full funnel from acquisition through purchase, measure cost of acquisition and cohort retention, and instrument events to see where people drop off. Wedding marketplaces have different repeat patterns than other categories, so adjust your metrics accordingly.
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Um, hi Nick, I'm Sarah. Thanks for this chat, it's been super helpful and insightful. Um, I have a background in branding and marketing. Um, I was at Twitter for the last 5 and a half years, before that at a communications firm. Um, but I recently launched my own peer-to-peer marketplace. It's, um, essentially very similar to a Poshmark but focusing on all different types of bridal wear. And we've seen— we're in our early days, we just launched about 4 months ago, um, and we've seen a lot of strong traction. We're growing the amount of inventory on our site, um, and so we're keeping it very lean right now, still just working off of, um, a very small investment. What you said about really stepping on that investment resonated with me. So I'm curious, as you took those 2 years to really grow and scale locally and just keep everything really lean, what type of metrics did you focus on whether it be like sell-through rate, dollar amount that items are selling for, the amount of inventory you have on your site. I'm just curious about the type of milestones or traction that you think that investors are really looking for. So when you're ready to, you know, start raising that bigger round to really grow and scale, you know, what did you think really caught their attention or what would you recommend focusing on as a founder?
Yep, that's a good one. So I would take and optimize, you can do this in Excel. I mean, there's, you don't have to be that sophisticated, but I would say that you have kind of 2 funnels. One is how are you attracting users in, right? And you have every channel there. What are they doing? Like, what is it costing you to acquire that user? Then they get into your, you know, onto your marketplace, then what are they doing, right? So if you're an investor, wouldn't it be great to see like, oh, you're able to attract users through this channel and here's what they end up doing on the marketplace. So I would, I would take your registration process, right? And, you know, the purchasing process, and I would just map that out into one long funnel that shows the end-to-end experience because that'll help you and the team focus. You could say, man, everyone keeps getting stuck at registration. What are we doing wrong here? Let's just get after that for the next few sprints and make that better. Oh, we fixed that. Okay, now we're going over here, man. The people keep abandoning the shopping cart. Okay, now we're going to fix this. And you're just trying to make that more efficient and more efficient, more efficient, and just Focus on that entire thing until that, you know, so that's kind of, I would call that like the cost of real acquisition. Then it's okay, like our people, and then it's all about retention. Everybody, every investor harped on cohort retention till the end of time because, okay, great, you acquired that first user. Are they coming back? Are they using you? And so I'll pick on Wish. I mean, 6 years ago, everyone loved Wish. And I just felt like it was crap. I'm like, this is crap. Are you going back and buying products here again and again? And then the answer, you can clearly see it in the public markets, was no. They had terrible retention. So they were spending, I don't know how much money, but they had the worst retention. So like, who wants to sign up on that business? So you kind of have to, I would think about it in that way. Like you got this external funnel that leads to an internal funnel. Then you got something that says, okay, show me retention over time. What does day 1 retention look like? What does, what does, you know, does month, you know, month 30, you know, day 30 look like? And in your case, it's, it's going to be more challenging because, because it's maybe you don't care about the long term because hopefully you're not getting married like 5 times, but maybe. So I think that's just something that I think it's a little unique for you in terms of a wedding. So you might want to optimize a little bit more on that first part, but Those are the 2 things I would really think through is, and instrument everything, track everything. My co-founder was obsessed with event tracking. And to be clear, I was usually like, no, we gotta ship, we gotta get more stuff out. I was usually the one that was telling him he was going too slow. But I think there's a good balance there. And now looking back, like he was right on a lot of it because once we had all that, once we had that visibility, the full funnel visibility, then we could move a lot faster because we knew exactly where things were dropping off and we could tweak things. So. I think that's just spend a lot more time instrumenting the machinery so you have that, so you have more informed decisions.
