Bounce's founder listed his own apartment on the platform to prove the concept worked, then knocked on doors across New York to recruit merchants despite being mistaken for a scammer. Once they had enough listings in New York, they used that success to expand to San Francisco.
What were some of those kind of like early strategies that you used or maybe even tactics to kind of like onboard your first kind of supply, you know, generate demand and build marketplace liquidity?
I mentioned that before I even showed customers what the supply network was, I was just like, call us. And then I could try to fill in the gaps as we went. But at that time I was really going for anything. I put my own apartment on on Bounce so people could book that. I would be working. It wasn't great for deep work because I'd be working in the middle of something and then the doorbell would ring and I'd have to run down the stairs and greet the customer. At some point that became too much that I had to, we had to turn off that location. Otherwise I'd get no work done. And then yeah, I really just went door to door, knocked on a bunch of stores. I had some crazy stories from there where People were like, what are you talking about? What are you doing here? And people thinking I was scamming them. And so, yeah, really just tried everything. And eventually we got enough stores on board in New York that it was a solid customer offering. And then we started expanding to more cities. San Francisco was our second city.
No, that's actually a great point. I'm glad you brought it up. I was going to ask about, you know, in the earlier stages, did you constrain to one market kind of being a local marketplace? So So how'd you think about that? You know, when the right time was to expand from New York into your kind of like second and third market? Yeah.
So the conventional wisdom, which I think is actually correct, is to really focus— correct in most cases— is to really focus on, you know, one market, really make sure you can build that into a big, big market and then expand. What I saw, which was different than that, was a lot of our customers were travelers. They would use us in New York and they would say, I want to use this in Miami. Are you guys in Miami yet? Or whatever city. And the answer was no. And I felt like after a while, it felt like we were not serving the number one customer request, which was, can I use this in more cities? And so still we focused on New York for the first, probably at least 6 months. Just so we, you know, we were still in the pre-product market fit, making sure this was a real business. And then I flew out to San Francisco where I had lived before and was familiar with the city. And I felt like that would be the true test of if Bounce was just a New York thing or if it was a bigger thing. Because I was looking, I was talking to investors lightly at that time trying to understand, hey, should we raise VC money? Or not yet. And a lot of folks were like, oh, like, I don't know about this thing, or, oh, maybe this only works in New York because of how dense New York is. And so then, yeah, went over to San Francisco and I called a friend from college, my friend Bob, and I said, hey, he had some availability. He was on the job hunt at the time. And I said, do you want to work on a project with me? And I said, let's do this as fast as we can because that really proves our model. Let's spend 2 weeks trying to sign up all like enough supply to have San Francisco really get going. And so me and Bob, we went all around the city, we called a bunch of stores, and in 2 weeks we signed up probably 20 stores, which at the time we were really proud of. Now we'll sign up that many in like an afternoon. Not with one person, but with a few people, a bit bigger of a team. But yeah, I was like, wow, this works. And then we were getting bookings in San Francisco and it was like, okay, wow, I think we can really make a playbook out of this and scale it across the US. So then from there, we started looking at the rest of the United States. Chicago was the next market. Then we looked at Los Angeles. Basically every, every, all the big cities. And then spent a lot of 2019 going all around the United States.
