Reham Fagiri went through Y Combinator with a marketplace startup and credits the community, especially bi-weekly founder chats, as the biggest value. YC partners suggested copying Craigslist and Airbnb's early moves, but not everything worked for her business. She says the emerging marketplace founder community, led by Mike, taught her what actually translates.
Olivia, do you want to come on?
Yeah, for sure. I had a question. You mentioned a few times that you went through YC and you were kind of, you know, early in the batch. So I was curious to hear your take on, you know, as going through YC as a marketplace, because, you know, would love to kind of get your insights on how that process was as a marketplace when, you know, maybe it might be a little bit more challenging to to get traction or to get started. So would love your advice for, you know, early-stage founders that might be thinking about an accelerator.
Yeah, YC was great. I'm still in touch with a lot of the folks there. And it's an incredible community. And so for us, when we went through YC, you know, I wouldn't have thought on my own, you know, the story I told in the beginning of like just copying these listings from Craigslist, like, you know, it just really helps because they see so many companies. And, you know, they've, they've tried, like, they give us advice like, oh, this is where, because they had you know, front seat access to Airbnb's growth and all of that. So they were like, well, you should try X, Y, and Z. It worked for Airbnb. They— but not everything is going to work, right? So like, for example, they had, you know, one of the partners suggested, oh, like you should consider taking photos of and like, you know, trying to offer that. And we did. It didn't work for us like how it worked. Like, I know Airbnb had this iconic story about like the founders going and taking photos, which we did too, but it didn't yield the same results. But just to answer your question more simply, like, yes, I think accelerators are a really good way. One, community-wise, you know, we would have these group chats every 2 weeks. And, you know, and we're all sitting at the table, sitting around the room, and everybody was talking about their challenges. And then, you know, you have the partners facilitating it. But what ends up coming out of it is like, we'll realize that we're all having very similar while our businesses are different, but they're very similar experiences, even though some of our marketplaces, some of them are enterprise, some of them may be consumer goods, whatever it is. So I think just generally speaking, building that community, and I think like hats to you, Mike, for creating the marketplace community. I wish that existed, you know, 10 years ago. It would have been amazing. And I think for marketplaces, like the more, the more you can be engaged, the more you can talk to people who have done it before. And see what worked for others and like trying to figure out how to make it work for yourself.
