Early-stage marketplaces face different bottlenecks at different times: first supply, then demand, then trust and safety. Founders need to identify which problem is biggest right now and align the whole team around solving it, rather than spreading focus across recruiting, retention, and optimization.
Do you have any kind of tips for early-stage marketplace founders that you'd like to share with us?
Yeah. I mean, one is, and I think this is probably true for founding any stage company, but it always changes. So you'll have founders who will come in at a seed round and they will say, the supply side is the hard side. Here's what we're doing to figure it out. Once we crack this, then everything is going to work. And then they crack it and then another problem emerges or another kind of bottleneck emerges. And so I think always staying flexible, always being kind of responsive and understanding that the challenges that you'll face and the bottlenecks you'll face and the hurdles you'll face are going to evolve. And it oftentimes starts feeling one way and then it changes and you just have to make sure you're kind of managing the company and managing the product in the right way. We always see people They start with, we have either supply side or demand side is hard. And then at a certain point, things start to work and the flywheel takes effect and then trust and safety comes in. And then they're like, oh, well, we never even thought about trust and safety. And then all of a sudden trust and safety becomes this big challenge that needs to be addressed. And so there's— and that happens all the way to Airbnb at a public company with the pandemic happening. And how do you kind of like manage this kind of shock to the company. So I think point one is probably just that it's always going to change and you kind of have to embrace that. It's never like you figure it out and then it just kind of, it just goes on autopilot. And then I think 2 is there's a million things happening, especially in a marketplace company where you've got supply-side challenges, demand-side challenges. You're trying to recruit the company, you're trying to think about your funnels, you're trying to think about retention, you're trying to think about segmentation. There's always like a million different things happening. And I think you kind of think about those things as they help you kind of like discover what your core challenge is and they help you solve what your core challenge is. But the more you can be really, really specific and clear on what your core challenge is at that moment, the easier it makes it. Because there is the risk that you get distracted by a million different things going on. But the more specific you can be, the more precise you can be, the more you can make sure everybody on your team is aligned against that stuff. And then all these other things are kind of like inputs and outputs to help you kind of solve that one thing. So maybe just kind of like prioritization, I guess, is kind of like a key tip for folks building marketplaces.
Yeah, no, that's great. It's also somewhat comforting sometimes just to hear, you know, others with their input saying there's a million things going on. So it doesn't just feel like, you know, hey, that's just Exactly.
I mean, and once you start to really kind of boil it down, you realize that a lot of it is— a lot of it doesn't really matter. The dimensionality as a founder and understanding dimensionality is super important. So, you know what, and listen, I was a founder, so like I understand that this is really, really hard to do, but understanding kind of like what's 10 out of 10, what's 7 out of 10, what's 5 out of 10, what's 3 out of 10. And then really probably just focusing on the 10 out of 10 things because you can't, you're, you can't do everything.
