Max Brun talks through starting SidelineSwap, a marketplace for sports equipment. He outsourced the first build to an Eastern European firm, focused the MVP on easy listing and buying, and hit $1M GMV through organic social growth before moving engineering in-house.
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So if we go back to the very beginning though, you know, what were some of those first steps that you actually took to start it as a marketplace?
Yeah, when we got started, like I said, it started with a conversation between 2 of us and kind of identifying that pain point. We didn't have backgrounds in tech, so, or, you know, marketplaces at all. So we kind of had to start from square one. For us, that was just honestly like, buying a bunch of books and reading whatever we could. This, you know, communities like this didn't exist. I think it would've been super helpful. That's why I'm excited to be a part of it, 'cause we were looking for any resources that we could find at the time. But we were kind of self-taught, figured it out, and we built the first version of the marketplace with an outsourced firm in Eastern Europe and focused on solving like a couple of core issues. Like we wanted to make it really easy to list. Uh, and, you know, easy to buy at the time. Like in 2012, when we first launched it, some of the tools weren't available. So we were using kind of a not great PayPal purchase experience. But when it really started to work, we, uh, you know, we had basically figured out there was a few things in our MVP period that, um, customers were gravitating to that we hadn't totally put all the pieces together. Uh, and the main thing was that like, There was a lot of communication happening through chat, but that was decoupled from the negotiation, the offer experience, and the purchase. So we combined the chat experience with the offer flow. And like, that was this like kind of pivotal moment for us where by doing that, integrating with Stripe and integrating with EasyPost at the time for shipments, We kind of put all the pieces together, and that that really got our marketplace to take off. And and that was around 2015. So I think like yeah, those were the the kind of initial steps for us in terms of like putting the product in place. Now from a marketplace perspective, I think we'll talk more about supply and demand, but we had to figure out how to get the supply side going. But at a high level, we've always felt like the supply side's the hard side for us. We we could. Get high-quality used gear onto our marketplace, we could grow a lot faster and we could sell it. Plenty of people shopping for deals in sporting goods, but there's not as many people looking to sell. So we've spent a lot of our time in the early days thinking about how to unlock high-quality supply and really focused on the quality piece of it, not just any supply, but how do we get inventory from like college athletes or pro athletes who could help draw eyeballs into the marketplace. And then on the demand side, it was a lot of social media in the beginning. We were able to hit $1 million in GMV without really spending any money on marketing. And I could talk a little bit about how we did that, but those were kind of the first steps. And then the team piece, over time we ended up bringing an engineering team in-house. And so we moved from an offshore web development firm to an in-house team. Uh, and yeah, so I mean, like, happy to dive in on different pieces of that, but that, that's kind of where we got started at a high level, really self-taught and just figured it out as we went.
