LawTrades founder shares how to launch a marketplace without building much: use Google Sheets, Zapier, and WordPress to handle payments manually while you talk to customers. Focus on demand-side users with recurring transactions, not automation, to find product-market fit faster.
You know, so you have some really incredible experience with Wall Trades and, you know, quite the journey building and scaling it. So do you have any kind of tips for early-stage marketplace founders that might be helpful?
Yeah, I would say focus, and this is what worked for me. Like, I'm not saying it's going to work for you guys because every marketplace has so many different nuances, but I would say what worked for us was for sure focusing a lot less on like automation, tech, and scaling, and, you know, all these things that you just hear on Twitter, TechCrunch, all this stuff, and really just focus on manually onboarding customers. Because if you could do that and you keep them happy, and if they're the right customer profile, you know, everything kind of works itself out. And you over time come to the conclusion that there's certain product things that really need attention. And I found that it's just much better position to be in than, you know, building, spending, you know, 6 months building something and then launching a product versus, you know, signing up people and also building at the same time. So that worked out incredibly well for us. And I strongly advise that. I think you're a big proponent of that too, from some of the content stuff that I see. And, you know, there's so many low-code solutions that you could use. The initial versions of LawTrades were, and I'm talking about 2 years ago, were a bunch of spreadsheets on Google, Zapier, a landing page on WordPress, and just that was really it. And we would process payments manually for people. So that's how we kind of stuck everything together and it allowed us to just Be really heads down on finding product-market fit rather than, you know, doing the opposite first.
Yeah, that's great. I can now certainly relate to that. So I definitely share a lot about no-code and low-code.
So yeah, I would say another thing that's really useful because we just had so many battle scars from it is try— if on the demand side, if you're very transaction-focused, I would say to like hone in on the customers that need multiple transactions or significant activity very frequently. I found that to be, you know, that's when we had our big inflection point for us as a company is when we saw the same company not only using us every month, but they would also expand their usage with us over time versus the earlier days where it varied so much. You know, we would have some companies that use us kind of frequently, and then some where they might use us once, they were super happy, they were, you know, grateful for the service, but they didn't really need us after that. And that puts you in a rabbit hole where you just have to keep adding more customers, and that becomes a lot more expensive and, uh, you know, a nightmare to manage, um, over time.
Yeah, that— I was actually gonna jump back in during the group Q&A and ask about that, you know, as far as, um, moving more towards mid-market and enterprise, if that was primarily based off of trying to increase the frequency of usage and not having to acquire new customers with startups that might have a lower frequency and unfortunately go out of business.
Exactly. Yeah. We dealt with the same thing. And it's like, if we look at the companies that are the marketplaces that are significantly bigger than than law trades. I think of companies like Turing or The Mom Project or Catalant is one that I also studied very early on. Upwork might be another one. And the commonality with those marketplaces are they're all huge, but they got there by just finding those same subset of customers that had significant engagement activity with them. You take something like Uber or DoorDash, it's like the same thing there, right? Like I literally use those services every single week and, you know, they know that behind the scenes, right? And they're able to really optimize how I use their platform. So I would say that that's really important at the earlier days and it's worth spending the time to figure that out manually.
