The Primary Sales Channels Early Stage Marketplaces Can Use

So what are like the primary channels that you're seeing that are effective for early-stage marketplaces?

You know, it's interesting. I think it changes. You know, I think I've definitely seen a decrease in effectiveness of cold email, you know, as far as automated email and using that to acquire supply. I mean, it's still cheap to do. And so you can still do it, right. But, you know, I talked to a lot of early-stage marketplace founders who are just like, I'm trying to do this and You know, it's not working, or I'm not getting as much as I want, or what have you. And yeah, it's because everyone's overloaded, you know, with emails. And so, you know, I do think that there is value in getting in front of the supply side. If you have on the supply side, you're acquiring businesses and you need a sales team, I do think there is value in getting in front of them in person in the early stages. I think you can learn a lot by meeting them one by one. And so I have seen a little bit of a return to outside sales or partnership teams actually, you know, landing in a market and hitting the streets and doing that, both as a way to learn about partners, but as a way to just cut through the noise of all of the cold calling and cold emailing and cold LinkedIn messages. that people are seeing. Now, it's obviously more expensive, right, to do that. But at the end of the day, the goal is not to optimize for the cheapest thing in the early stage, it's to find something that actually works. And so, you know, keep experimenting and find something that works. And then you can kind of iterate from there. So, you know, definitely challenges with email, and definitely seeing a little bit more of a return to getting in front of You know, the partners in person when you can do it is some things I'm seeing lately.

Yeah. So you mentioned as far as, you know, finding something that works, right? And if we kind of go back and we say, hey, we're like an earlier stage marketplace and we're kind of channel testing and, you know, and testing our funnels and this, you know, really refining, you know, even our value prop, you know, what are some kind of signals to where you would think about, okay, this is something to actually, you know, focus on and really double down on?

Am I getting any inbound leads? And what are they? So I think having that landing page, having that baseline case where you always have it there and you can always see how many people are hitting that page, how many people are coming through, what type of leads are coming through this channel. As an example, an interesting story is in the early days at Yelp, first off, we had a self-serve business at Yelp and that thing was built and for years no businesses signed up for it. I mean, we had I mean, dozens of millions of dollars in revenue, like the company, but we had the self-serve funnel and people knew what Yelp was, but SMBs just, they wouldn't use it, right? They needed that handholding. And what we found though, which was interesting, was the one thing that came through that self-serve channel a lot was these agencies and these resellers. And I really wish we would've built on that business a little bit sooner. Now, Yelp has a huge channel business now through agencies and resellers. But I think that was an example of an interesting learning where maybe we could have found a way to partner with some of those companies a little bit earlier because we saw them coming through the inbound funnel, right? But yeah, I think building that landing page, building that funnel and figuring out what that looks like is really important to give you a base case of what types of leads are you getting and what are people finding out there. And then you can kind of lean on that. But, you know, I think it really depends on the company generally. I think most people, curation is really important, as I mentioned previously with marketplaces. And so you wanna talk directly to the most important, you know, suppliers, right, on the supply side and figure out like, okay, how strong is your product market fit with them and what feedback are you getting from them? That's the thing that I would be testing for on the, when I'm testing my different channels, right, is not only is it effective, but is it acquiring the right type of the quality, not just the quantity? Because I think in the early stages, yes, you need to get liquidity, you need to get some quantity and figure that out. But at the end of the day, you are going to need to get quality. And so I guess my point is, if you're going to double down and invest on a channel, make sure that that channel can not just drive quantity, but actually drives quality as well. And so the best way to do that is just to talk directly to the businesses.