Ella shares practical advice for early-stage B2B marketplace founders. Focus on finding product-market fit by building a founder buyer circle of target retailers, lean into a differentiated maker or community side, and leverage existing retail relationships to get started.
Chapters
You have some really great experience, and specifically in B2B marketplaces in the earlier stage. So do you have any specific tips that might be helpful for founders that are building early-stage B2B marketplaces that might be helpful?
I don't know that there's any secret sauce. I mean, I think we're still trying to figure out this, you know, the market fit, to be frank. We chose very early on, again, where's the bottleneck? And we said, not only where the biggest challenge is, but where our unique offering is, was on our maker side, that our community is what makes us quite differentiated. And so we focused on them. That said, that's not the monetization side of the business. And so, you know, there's a bit of a risk in that, that you build a platform for makers and then it doesn't have a market fit on the buyer side. We've come from this sector, we know what brands need, and we know also what sells into the retail market. So that did help quite a bit. We leaned on a lot of existing relationships, retailers that I developed relationships with in my last business. And then we really just had a bit of an obsession and just sort of holding on. We actually created, maybe the advice would be to create a founder buyer circle. So we did that pretty early on where we engaged a group of 5, 10 retailers that we were feeling like were kind of our ideal profile. And really held them close, guided them through the process, asked for their feedback, gave them lots of free gifts, you know, buy and shop, tell us how your experience is. It was also really important for us to kind of have that flywheel of exposure and interest from the retailers that we were focused on. And then I think, yeah, just having, staying true to, you know, not get too distracted by the competition. I think there's a lot of noise in this space right now, and it's a really exciting space to be in. But I think frankly, it's just a solid market and solid business opportunity that was just never really exploited before because people could just physically go to trade shows and other things. And I think we're in kind of a hot market that we, we need to focus on our differentiation. And I think that that is ultimately what's going to win us in the long tail. That's yet to be proven out. But I think early stage, it's about just being completely committed to your buyers and having those very close relationships. Yeah. Yeah.
