Agata Krzysztofik: How to launch and grow a marketplace startup, identifying your audience and more.

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Ehan. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We have an awesome, awesome, awesome speaker lined up. I can't wait for you all to meet her. Her name is Agata. She's the head of growth for Growth Mentor. She's gonna be talking about how marketplaces founders, how startup founders at marketplaces can launch them, grow them. I've been following Growth Mentor for a very long time. So really, really glad that she's here to about their learnings and all of that. I guess we're just waiting for everyone to join in. We've had about 400+ people sign up, so I'm expecting maybe around 200 or so to show up, hopefully. We're at about 82 online. I guess just for some housekeeping, so we'll kind of go over some basics, but, you know, tell us in the chat. You have a chat icon there on the right-hand side. Tell us where you're coming in from. We usually, for these events, we get a global audience, so I'm hoping, okay, I see Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, Washington, cool. London, Boston, Dallas, Texas. Wow, okay, very, very international. Portugal, Joburg, London, cool, cool, cool. Colorado, okay, that's awesome. Like I said, we're all here to see Agata. So Akshay, can you bring Agata on? On the stage, please. Let's kind of introduce her to everyone and then we'll kind of get the presentation started. And while he's doing that, just some housekeeping items. There will be a Q&A, there's a Q&A button on the right-hand side. Please use that to ask your questions. And then from there, what we will do is just start to rank them up and queue them up. So yeah, that should be fairly self-explanatory. After that, so Agata will do a presentation, we'll open up for some Q&As. And then what's going to happen is we'll end the presentation, but don't hop off. There's networking tables. If you all want to stay and network with each other, you can network with each other as well. So yeah, I think that's about it in terms of housekeeping items. Agata is here on stage. She is ready to go already. Hey, Agata, how's it going?

Oh, now the microphone is working. I'm good. I'm super excited to be here and amazing that there are so many international people. I heard when you were saying that like, you know, so many different cities and locations. So that's great.

Yeah, we are, we're at 120 people so far from different places. So all of them have come here to hear you speak, and then obviously the recording is going to go out to all the 400+ people who've signed up. I think it might have been 500. So no pressure. Fun fact for everyone, I'm going to be very biased and advocate heavily for Growth Mentor. It's helped me a lot personally in my career. So whatever Agata is saying, please, please just like switch off everything else in the background and just really tune in for the next, I would say, 20-30 minutes, and then we'll open it up for some Q&A. With that said, I'm going to remove myself from stage, and then Agata, the floor is yours.

Thanks so much. Okay, I hope the slides are working and everything, so we don't have any technical difficulties, but if there will be something, then just let me know. Um, so how are everyone? Um, my name is Agata and I'm the interim VP of Growth at Growth Mentor. I have been focusing on growing startups, uh, uh, for over 8 years now. Uh, before joining Startupport, I was working for 6 years at, uh, Google on the Google Ads team. I have been startup growth advisor and mentor since 2019 on the Growth Mentor platform. I have seen challenges that marketplace startup founders face. Many startups start with a really promising idea, then they fail to validate it, or they see simply no traction and end up closing their business shortly after the launch. The reasons differ here. So it's either lack of product-market fit, it could be an unstable or unsustainable business model, uh, or maybe like poor product experience or no marketing strategy that they have set up at the beginning. And as we move into 2023, the market becomes more competitive. I think we all have noticed it, right? Like, there is a lot of bad news for startups out there, and on top there's this whole uncertainty, uh, related to crisis, all of the layoffs that we read about, the banks in the US and so on. So Definitely not the easy time to launch a startup, but it doesn't mean it's impossible, right? So today, um, it's really crucial that marketplace startup founders need to be strategic in their approach, uh, how they launch and also how they grow their marketplace startup. And that's what I want to talk about today as well. So I'll be sharing some growth lessons that we have learned at Growth Mentor over the years. And my goal for the next 60 minutes is to make this presentation and also the Q&A after as actionable as possible so you can actually easily apply the learnings to your own marketplace startup this year and, you know, following years as well. So we'll go over a few topics. The first one is the importance of planning. So identifying the problem worth solving, researching and validating your target market, building a minimum lovable product, MLP, as we call it, choosing the right business model, uh, solving the chicken and egg problem, and launching your marketplace, and then growing your marketplace. And we'll end with a Q&A, which we mentioned already at the beginning. Um, but first, let me tell you a little bit more about Growth Mentor because you might not have heard of it. So Growth Mentor is a curated marketplace where ambitious startups and entrepreneurs can match up with 500+ experienced and vetted growth mentors. We essentially help startup founders get advice, validate their ideas, and upskill across 33+ critical skills, which are ranging from product-market fit, um, go-to-market strategy, growth marketing, or, for example, building your team. The platform was launched in September 2018. It's a 100% bootstrap company. And in the last 4.5 years, we grew to 30,000 sessions booked, 500+ mentors across these 30 skills that I mentioned already before. To a community of almost 2,000 members and over 1,000 paying customers. We have also mentors across really big brand names. So we're really proud of this. And I think it's pretty good results for the first 4 years as well. One of the most important things you can do as a marketplace startup founder is to have a comprehensive Plan. And that's the first thing that I want to talk about today. Uh, and you need this plan before you can even launch your business. I mean, it's obvious kind of, right? And, and the plan should include the following: your statement of the problem you're trying to solve, uh, the market research, and then validation of your marketplace idea, and choosing, uh, also like the, the right business model. And then this will give you a clear understanding of the market, the problems your potential customers are facing, and the solutions that they are also seeking on the market. And according to CB Insights, no market need is the top reason for startup failure. It accounts for 42% of all failed startups. Um, that's why validation of the market is so crucial as well. So your first step is identifying a problem you want to solve for your VR marketplace. So you need to ask yourself these questions. Is it easy to articulate the problem? The easier it is to communicate and understand, the quicker it will be also possible to build awareness for you, demand, and also adoption. The second question Why is this a problem in the first place as well? So why the problem exists, why it hasn't been solved already, and why it might be worth tackling by your marketplace startup. The third question, is it feasible to solve the problem? So realistically, it must be also possible to solve a problem with appropriate efforts. So you need to think about it if your idea for solving it is actually like realistic to build as well, right? Because otherwise you will drown in building something that is actually like not possible to solve. And the solution that you're going to build, is it actually really going to tackle the problem? So could someone else easily solve it as well and thus compete with you? Is the problem, is a problem that lots of people have? So the bigger the pool of people experiencing the problem, the larger is also your potential market and potentially also the revenue, right? Are these people willing to spend money to solve this problem? So if they are not, you don't have a business that will make money. So it won't make sense for you to invest time in it unless obviously you are creating a nonprofit marketplace. Here are a few examples of marketplace problem statements. So Uber, which was founded in 2009, their problem was to the unreliability of hailing a taxi. Then Airbnb, which was founded in 2008, they initially focused on actually like renting their own mattresses in apartments during conference times. And then, you know, the rent was super high and that was actually the problem that they were trying to solve. Then when it comes to DoorDash, the problem was that restaurants weren't able to afford delivery drivers. And then for Flexport, the problem was that freight shipping was a traditional pen and paper industry with multiple untrustworthy middlemen that were extremely opaque and lacked customer control. Here is an example of the problem canvas that Foti, the founder of Growth Mentor, made for Growth Mentor in 2017. So that was well before he wrote the first line of code for the product. And as you can see, he split it up into like context, problem, alternatives, customers, emotional impact, alternative shortcomings. But when you look at the problem, like that was the one that he was facing himself as well, that this T-shaped marketers with deep experience are quite rare and they are in high demand, which makes them obviously automatically expensive as well. And this was putting a lot on actually early stage startup founders who couldn't really afford a rate, an hourly rate, which was costing more than $100, right? So that's why buying a subscription for Growth Mentor would give them access to a lot of people who normally were charging a lot as free mentors, and then you could tap into more than one marketing advisor at the same time. Uh, you should conduct also an extensive research to gain a deeper understanding of the following. So first of all, your market size, the market segments, competitors, and target customers. When it comes to market size, you should assess the potential market size and its growth potential. You can find online some reports showing you the valuation of a given market. Some of them are paid, but you know, sometimes it might be worth to also like buy this reports just like to see what is the potential value of it. Although getting into a smaller, um, market and like basically first winning the smaller market might be easier, you need to think about how this would impact your business model as well, like long term, right? Uh, for the market segments, there may be some promising niches in your target market that nobody else is currently targeting, and it's helpful to divide your market into different market segments and do a deeper analysis of each market segment. And this will help you choose the best niche for your marketplace startup as well. And I'll show you in a second why focusing on one market segment might actually be better than on the whole market. Uh, so that's how actually the majority of big marketplace businesses got started. Uh, first, later they grew and expanded to other niches. So when you look at Uber, it was initially just a taxi replacement. And then it extended to the food delivery market. Amazon started simply as a small online bookstore and expanded into this full-blown e-commerce company that they are right now. And Airbnb started by just offering short-term room rentals, and then they ended up becoming a solution for business travel, for home rentals, and also during, you know, COVID times, unique travel experiences, some of which you could even— you were able to book them even online. Like, you know, there were like wine tasting classes and things like that. Nowadays, it's also impossible to find a market without competitors. They will be there, either direct competitors or indirect competitors. So it's important that you do your research to understand who your competitors are. How long they have been around, and how good their solutions are at solving the problem you are trying to tackle as well. This will help you understand common business models in your target market, identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, and create a better go-to-market strategy later on as well. Who are your target customers? So it's important to create personalize for both your supply and demand to gain a deeper understanding of both sides. So you can create their profiles by answering the following questions. So first of all, who are your buyers and suppliers? Uh, so think about demographics, right, for both. What is their job role? How big is the company they work at? In which industry do they operate? What are the main goals and challenges that they are facing? How do they learn? Like, you know, where do they learn online? How they make purchase decisions as well. That one is also very important because that will give you some idea of potential revenue later on. Once you profile them, it's time to find and create a list of people who basically would match the profile of your potential customers and suppliers. And you could create that list by either doing LinkedIn research. You could use a tool like something similar like Apollo.io, for list building, you could generate beta signups through promotion on pages like a beta list or beta bound, or you could run Google Ads to generate some initial subscribers. And the last approach, the one with running Google Ads, that was actually the one that Foti chose to generate a list of potential target customers. And that was his initial list of people who was basically like, you know, interviewing and validating the market with. Once you have a list of people who could be your potential buyers and suppliers, survey or interview them to validate your target market. And here are the 5 steps Foti took to validate his marketplace idea in 2017. So before he actually launched Growth Mentor, uh, he created a beautiful pre-launch landing page. Uh, then he invested $500, uh, in Google Ads. And then he incentivized subscribers to jump on calls with him where he could basically interview them, ask them the right questions that would help him to validate the market. And then he used the data to iterate on his messaging. Another option, like if let's say you don't want to go with Google Ads and you are struggling with building this list, you could use, uh, some solutions like, for example, the user interviews platform, and it will help you find vet and organize prospects for your research. However, you must pay for each interview you perform $45 with this platform. You could also build a simple landing page with a sign-up form to generate first beta sign-ups. And as part of the sign-up process, you would ask the beta users to complete a survey about their problem, solution, the solutions they use right now and what they are missing in the current solutions. You could also, within the signup process, basically integrate something like Calendly into the form so that they could directly schedule a short interview with you so that you could gather additional insights with, with the signups. So after you have performed interviews and clearly defined the customer needs, and pain points, it's time to start building your minimum lovable product. And no, it's not a typo. Your product prototype basically needs to be not only functional, do the things that are right, solving specific problems, but the— it has to have something additional, right? Like, it's not enough anymore that it's like just the minimum viable product. Especially given that there's so much competition on the market. So you need to have something that people would love about your marketplace. And there could be different things. So for example, your design and user experience, experience that would be just mind-blowing comparison to other clunky old school alternatives that are out there. It could be your vetting process and creative collection of inventory that you're offering. Or it could be your disruptive business model, like for example, 0% commission, whereas let's say all the other competitors are offering only like commission-based business models or anything else that is like basically uniquely lovable about your marketplace and makes you stand out from the crowd. For us at Growth Mentor, it was a combination of our vetting process and super compressive comprehensive mentor profile pages that gave background info on what tools mentors were good at. And the answer to what will make your marketplace lovable will also be possible to be discovered through your initial discovery calls. So basically, once you know, gather this initial group of people who could be your potential customers, you can also discover through the calls, like, you know, what they don't like about the other alternatives, and that could give you additional ideas. As well. Unlike SaaS, where choosing the best business model is relatively straightforward, marketplaces are a bit more complex. So if you look at different marketplaces like Airbnb, Etsy, Cameo, Craigslist, Zillow, or Growth Mentor, all of them are marketplace, places, but each uses a completely different revenue model to make profits. For most marketplaces, charging a purchase-based commission is the best-fitting business model. However, the commission model is not always the right choice. So for example, if you look at us at Growth Mentor, this would not really work for us since more than 70% of our mentors don't charge for their calls, right? So it would not be possible really for us to do the commission, commission. So in our case, it made more sense to go with the subscription model. And some marketplaces, like for example Etsy, Amazon, they combine different revenue streams and they work with a mix of various marketplace business models that I'll show you now. So I'll show you, give you an overview of the 5 marketplace business models you could choose from: the commission model, subscription model, listing model, featured listing or ad placement model, and the freemium model. So the commission model is a revenue model where your marketplace charges a fee from each transaction as a commission, and this could be charged as a percentage of the transaction value or as a fixed fee. It's the most common business model for marketplaces. The marketplace may charge either the seller or the buyer or take a commission from both. Few marketplaces that are using actually this model is, let's say, BlaBlaCar, Airbnb, Fiverr, and Uber. And when we look at both pros and cons, the pros is that you can attract more sellers and buyers since basically anyone can join for free. It also helps you to increase trust and loyalty since there is no entry barrier at the beginning, right? So anyone can participate in the marketplace. Place. Each transaction also generates a revenue for you. The cons of this business model is that you will need to decide whom to charge. So would it be the demand or the supply side? Then also another thing is generating enough transactions. That's especially difficult at the beginning when, you know, you didn't grow yet. And the transactions might start happening outside of the marketplace. And what I mean by this is that, you know, eventually, like, people become smart. This happened, for example, even with Airbnb, right? Like, people don't want to pay commission. So they are trying to find out like the email address of the supplier and just basically complete the transaction outside of the platform where you might end up losing the revenue as well. So you will need to build some models in inside of your platform that would prevent your user base from doing it. The subscription model is a revenue model where a user is charged a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription fee for access to the marketplace. And as mentioned before, this is also a model we use at Growth Mentor. And in our case, the subscription fee is charged to individuals or companies basically seeking unlimited calls with vetted mentors. And we do not charge the mentors, and we also do not take any free from the paid calls if, if there are like, you know, paid services offered by the mentors. And the subscription model is a good choice for online marketplaces that do not have the resources to facilitate the transactions between the user or whose business model doesn't involve transactions between the demand and the supply side. And a few examples is like, uh, yeah, Asset Growth Mentor, Couchsurfing, LinkedIn, uh, Preply. I mean, like on LinkedIn, you can obviously also pay for the subscription, right? The pros is that it is a very predictable revenue. And that's overall like, you know, a benefit of subscriptions. You have a higher LTV and also less investment in user acquisition. And you can attract more clients. In terms of constraint, you end up having the chicken and egg problem that I will be talking about in a second as well. There might be also a problem with providing enough value for a regular payment. And that's also some problem that we often see at Growth Mentor that, you know, sometimes people schedule like a lot of calls in the initial few months. And then after a while, like, you know, they have all of this knowledge in there. And they would like to pause their subscription as well after some time. So this is kind of like a common problem for the subscription model. The listing model is a revenue model where a seller is charged a fixed fee for each listing posted on the marketplace. And while with the most commission models, your profit depends a lot on the quality of the products and the sales skills of your suppliers, this specific model allows you to generate income even from less popular products and sellers, since basically even the ones who are not popular can also purchase the paid listings. Marketplaces that use this model are Etsy, eBay, Realtor, and Amazon. And the pros include that it attracts more sellers and buyers since listing fees are generally small, and it also increases the quality of the listings. When it comes to the constraints, is that it takes longer to generate revenue, and it also requires a larger user base and you also end up with this chicken and egg problem here. Featured listing and art placement model is a revenue model where sellers are charged a flat fee for increased visibility on the marketplace. Sellers or service providers pay for a featured listing to be shown on the top of search results. So they are more likely to be chosen as the free listings. And the marketplaces that use this model are, for example, Zillow, OLX, and eBay. The pros include that it is an additional revenue stream, often if used in a combination with another business model that I mentioned. It could also attract more sellers and buyers since anyone can start for free, and you can also put your listings completely for free if you don't want to pay for the featured listings. The constraints are that it takes longer to generate revenue, It definitely requires large traffic and user base so that you could generate enough revenue that would allow your startups to become sustainable. And free users often outnumber paying users in this model. And then the last one is the freemium model, which is a revenue model where anyone can join and use the marketplace for free. It offers premium features for which users pay on top or premium subscription option or something like a cross, cross-selling of other services. This model is a bit tricky since it's challenging to generate revenue with this. The premium features offered by your marketplace need to be very, very attractive so that you would end up actually generating revenue with it. A really good example of a freemium marketplace that does it well is and Splash because they offer both the free and you can also do the paid options. And few other examples are also YouTube, Craigslist, and, uh, Maskus. When it comes to pros, it's easier to compete with other startups in your space. It also helps you attract more sellers and buyers since anyone can literally join for free. When it comes to constraints, it's challenging to generate enough revenue. Since obviously if people can use it for free, you'll need to offer like really, really good premium features so that they would end up deciding to pay for it. It's also harder to convert free users into paying ones and fewer users outnumber paying users. So a bit similar challenges like in the previous business model. One of the biggest challenges, and that's something also that I mentioned came up a few times when we were talking about the business models, is that when you kickstart your marketplace startup, you need to solve this chicken and egg dilemma. So you need to decide what comes first, chickens, aka the sellers, or the egg, aka the buyer. And solving this one is the most critical step you need to take before actually defining your go-to-market strategy and launching your marketplace. In case of Growth Mentor, we focused on driving supply first. First, in the 3 months of our soft launch in September 2018, we preceded the supply side with a strong pool of mentors. And it was easier, actually, than initially Foti has anticipated. In general, people in growth really love talking about growth. So convincing early access mentors to join us through LinkedIn outreach wasn't as challenging and is initially anticipated. Than anticipated. Etsy is also another example of a marketplace that focused on supply first. So a few months before their launch, they, uh, sent their team to attend art and craft shows across US and Canada. They did it on the weekends. They were distributing handmade promos and craft show kits to the sellers attending the shows. And also encouraging them to sign up for Etsy once the website is live. Etsy also collaborated with, uh, craftster.org, uh, an online message board, which back then had 100,000 members. And this way, by the time they were ready to launch Etsy, they had thousands of sellers excited to sign up and give Etsy a try. In general, For most marketplace startups, focusing on the supply side before the launch is the right move. Essentially, this will make your marketplace more valuable to the initial users as well. If you have all the suppliers there and they see basically, you know, that this, what you're offering is something that is attractive as well to the customers. Okay. So now we have the MLP. And enough initial supply to offer value to our first customers. So we are ready to launch our marketplace. I would suggest that you plan launch in two phases. The first one being the soft launch and the second one, the hard launch. Soft launch is the low-key beta launch to gather product feedback from the first 100 users. And then the hard launch is the proper launch like marketing launch event to acquire as many new customers as possible. I would suggest that you start planning your beta launch ahead of time. And the sooner you start, the higher the chances that you will hit your goal of 100 signups on the launch day. It will also buy you a bit more time to gather feedback and also improve your MLP. Prepare a launch plan that covers the following. So I included all the aspects here, like launch date, product messaging, product images, special offer for beta testers, a decent landing page with a form, list of pages to promote on, and list of people matching your target, uh, persona. So for the soft launch pages where you could promote your beta A few include is like beta lists, beta bound, relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups, which you could like basically list and, you know, put on some sort of a spreadsheet and Quora. So just basically looking at questions related to the problem you are trying to solve and also could put all of them in the spreadsheet and basically target these questions. And by commenting there, you could also drive some initial traffic. When you launch your beta, focus on gathering as much feedback as possible and building relationships with your early adopters. So the trust that you built with this first 100 users will help you promote and grow your business later on. And once you have it, it's time to iterate and improve your MLP based on the soft launch feedback. And once you're ready for the public launch, I would suggest that you create a new launch plan, which you should also plan at least 1 month ahead, especially if you are considering launching on Product Hunt. And I know that a lot of startups, you know, it's a big deal for them to launch on Product Hunt. So we'll go a bit more into detail for this. So Growth Mentor didn't launch on Product Hunt. Our founder, Foti, decided to save it for later. So we're still gonna launch there. And instead, he launched by dropping a request for feedback on the SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group. And this helped Growth Mentor to generate 500 early customers in the first 2 months after the launch. However, if you are planning to launch on Product Hunt, then I'm happy to share with you some tips based on my own experience. So I have project managed 4 different Product Hunt launches. First got some traction, but was not selected as product of the day. The second got the number 1 product of the day. The third got third product of the day. And then the second, the last product, the fourth one got the second product of the day. So I have like a pretty good traction at getting to the top placements on Product Hunt. And these are my tips that I have gathered over time. What really helped us to get there. So first thing is to announce the upcoming launch using Product Hunt Ship. And there you can actually announce it even 1 month ahead and already gather initial subscribers, like people who would be interested in your product. And what it will allow you to do is that ahead of the launch, you'll be actually able to communicate with all of these subscribers and automatically send them a push message once you actually go live on Product Hunt, which will get you this wave of people as well commenting on the product. And it's very helpful. It's kind of like helps you build community upfront as well. Second step is to secure a hunter and a good hunter is a Product Hunt power user. So you can check it by, by looking if he has gold or silver medal on Product Hunt, it's visible actually on the profile of the hunter. They should have at least 1,000 followers and the track record of past hunted products in the top. One example is the, the one that is on the screenshot here. So Chris Messina, um, you can work actually with Chris, but you have to secure him 1 to 2 months ahead of your launch because all the good hunters, they get booked out very fast. So it also depends, like, you know, when you are launching. If a lot of startups are launching around the same time probably it will be impossible to book them. So I would just really, if you want to work with a hunter, I would suggest planning ahead of time. Another thing is preparing your launch content. So there are a few things that you will need for the Product Hunt launch. That's the thing like your product name, the tagline. My tip is that I would suggest using something like numbers because people are in general drawn really to numbers or emojis. Description. Of your product, product link, thumbnail. If you use a GIF, that also, like, you know, helps your product to stand out since there will be other ones launching on the same day. Product video, a few product images or screenshots, and a founder's message, because that's something that you're gonna publish on your launch page as the first thing, where you also, like, you know, can talk about your offer that you have there, and you welcome people to share feedback about the product. I would also suggest preparing a special offer for the Product Hunt community. So it could be anything like a discount code, maybe like some additional features that are only limited to Product Hunt community, or let's say offering free usage of your product for a period of time, like one month. Another good thing is thinking about securing an agency. Usually these agencies have a team that will be covering the launch for the entire 24-hour cycle, helping you to promote it among their community. It's very hard if you like do it without them, because otherwise you kind of have to appoint people to be there around 24 hours, especially if you are not within the, uh, the given time zone of California. So it might be helpful when launching a product. Product Hunt as well to get a bit of support there. The next one, the last, not, it's not the last step, the sixth step is creating your support community. So make sure that you reach out to relevant Product Hunt members and share your product before the launch. You can basically research Product Hunt and see people who have like either liked or commented on similar product to yours. You can also create a list of relevant Slack communities and once you go live, basically post about it also there. And you can ask your own network for help on LinkedIn or wherever you have your network. The next step is creating promotional assets, email banners, social media visuals and videos, and a homepage banner. So once you launch, it makes sense that like on your homepage, you put something like a banner where you say as well, like, we are live on Product Hunt because it also invites your visitors to actually go back to Product Hunt and, you know, add comment and add feedback. So it drives more engagement on Product Hunt this way. Stay engaged also on the launch date. Like and respond to comments from the Product Hunt community. Reach out to your support community from step 6 that I mentioned before. But don't ask directly for upvotes because actually, like, uh, you can get penalized by Product Hunt for doing this. And also share your Product Hunt offer via video on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Reddit. Like here's an example what I shared when I was launching one of the products. We had a special offer for a pro, for the Product Hunt community. And we basically went live promoting it with a video on LinkedIn. So basically tapping into the network that I had on LinkedIn as well. And also tag Product Hunt on Twitter and Facebook because often they you know, kind of filter for these mentions, and they will help to promote as well your product on Product Hunt if they find your product interesting. Okay, so now that we already discussed the launch, now it's time for growing a marketplace and, and looking how is it different than growing a SaaS startup, for example. So marketplaces are two-sided. We all know it. So you need to focus on growing both your customers and also your suppliers. So you acquire your first customers during the launch of your marketplace. Make sure that you nourish these relationships as your business grows. You will need to scale your customer acquisition efforts. And also, you know, this initial relationships can help you with referrals and Basically word of mouth as well. Choosing the right marketing channels is crucial to the success of your marketplace startup. Uh, you should develop a marketing plan that resonates with your target market and build brand awareness. This may include channels like SEO, social media, influencer marketing, email marketing, or other tactics. At Growth Mentor, we focus on the following marketing channels. Uh, the first one is the SEO and content marketing, word of mouth and networks, uh, Google Ads and social ads, and outbound, uh, marketing. 70% of traffic comes from SEO and content marketing. And from the beginning, Growth Mentor has invested a lot in content, uh, led SEO. We got into the habit of releasing at least one new blog post per week, and 55% of our organic traffic is generated actually through the blog. We also create other things like glossary pages, industry pages, roles, and tools landing pages that drive additional organic traffic. And if you look as well at our mentors, each of the 500+ mentor profiles Those pages are indexed as well in Google, and this generates additional 2% of our organic traffic. From the beginning, we also generated a lot of demand through word of mouth and other people's networks like LinkedIn. Most of our customers are startup founders who often have, you know, often have no one to talk to. And after the first call with the mentor, they experience this aha moment and really wanted to share this with their friends. And talk about it. So word of mouth was our number one source of acquisition at the beginning when we launched. Many of our mentors are mini influencers on LinkedIn or Twitter. So whenever they post about us or add us to their profile page, it's also a win for us. We try to make it a win-win relationship for both sides. For example, we share their stellar mentor session review on LinkedIn and tag them. Then they would reshare it, uh, or we comment on it, or we like it, make it more visible, uh, to their network and also to our network. In 2023, we are planning to invest more in referrals. So we are currently building a referral program for both mentors and mentees. For mentors, we plan to enable shareable links, allowing the referrals to create a free account and book a free call with them. And once their referral becomes a paying customer, we will share a percentage of the subscription revenue with the respective mentor. I mean, it's still in the planning phase, so we might change it slightly, but that's the initial plan as of right now. We are also investing more in outbound marketing. We are using this channel to promote our new team plan to startups who want to invest in mentorship as part of their professional development budget. So Growth Mentor is basically a very good solution for teams at startups who are looking to upskill their employees. And that's basically what a lot of our outbound emails are about. Other channels we are doubling down on in 2023 are video marketing. We are looking at a new format of our podcast. So it will be like a revamped version of it. We have also launched new Google Ads campaigns and are experiencing, experimenting with social ads, mainly through Facebook and also LinkedIn, and focusing more on the broad match and basically increase brand awareness using Facebook. The interesting thing for us is that to grow all these channels, We are working with our own mentors. So we are lucky enough to have some of the brightest minds who can advise us on how to make, for example, Facebook ads work or Google ads and video marketing work. So we're always trying to eat our own dog food and work with our mentors. Okay, so we covered the growth on the customer side, but outside of growing your customers, you must continue growing also your supply. For Growth Mentor, we are getting an average of 300 mentor applications per month, all without spending any money on driving supply. And what works for us is the network effect, which is unique for marketplace startups. Also, existing suppliers attract new ones. And here is how it basically works for us. So word of mouth and LinkedIn. So Things like mentor badges, uh, experience that people can add or on their profile page. So often people add it as one of their job experiences that they are a mentor of Growth Mentor, uh, podcasts that we are shared, like if we have mentors as guests on the podcast, and posts like blog posts that basically mentors also creating. Then also searchable mentor profiles, um, uh, the community aspect of Growth Mentor and networking and the guest blog posts that I mentioned before as well. Early on when we established Growth Mentor, we put a lot of emphasis on the 4-step recruiting and vetting process. It was really important for us that our supply side is basically really highly vetted. So the mentors that people can find on the platform are of high quality. And that helps us to maintain this high quality of our marketplace. So only 5% of the applicants that we get in, uh, actually pass all the 4 steps and end up becoming our mentors. Uh, so we make sure that, like, you know, uh, it's not just the skills that they have, but also like the way people are, that they are actually a good mentor material and that they genuinely enjoy helping people. As well, and they are able to share their know-how with others. For every marketplace, the growth of demand and supply side will work obviously differently. So it's not only, always gonna work the same way as for us at Growth Mentor. So it's crucial that you experiment with different channels to find the top 2 or 3 that will work for your specific marketplace. This, uh, use case. And once you identify the channels, it will come down to basic scaling them so that you can get the most out of these channels. Okay, that's it. So in conclusion, just to summarize, launching and growing a marketplace startup is a challenging but it is a very rewarding journey. And by planning ahead, developing a product that meets the needs of your target market and that people will love, and defining the right go-to-market strategy, and focusing on growing your marketplace, you can build a successful business also in 2023 despite the whole crisis. It is still possible. And if you would want to get founder-to-founder advice from someone who has launched a successful marketplace, I invite you to check out Growth Mentor and book a one-on-one call with Foti, the founder of Growth Mentor. And outside of Foti on Growth Mentor, you also find 50 other mentors who grew such marketplaces as Shopify, Fiverr, Preply, Calmery, and many others. A few of them I have listed here on the slide as well. So you can see that we have, for example, the former head of acquisition at Uber. We also have Nick who was a product leader, the director at Shopify as well. And we have also Harry, who is himself a co-founder at Respondent, which is also a marketplace startup. Thanks for your attention. And now it's time for some questions. If you have any, I'll be happy to respond to them. And let's stay in touch. You can find me also on LinkedIn, or you can check out my website at meetagata.com.

Awesome, thanks so much, Agata. This was super, super, uh, interesting. So Foti is actually in the audience. Um, I'm just seeing how do I bring him up.

Exactly, if people have questions, you know, regarding Growth Mentor and how he launched it or software stack, he'll be happy to respond.

Yeah, I think, okay, I don't know where he was, his hands were raised. Okay, Forte, if you raise your hand again, I can probably bring you up and I think you can do audio, but Agata, let's kind of jump into questions. So folks, if you jump into the Q&A section, everyone's asking questions, but you actually can upvote them. Just 'cause of the time limits here, I'm only gonna do about at least 3 of them. So please upvote and we'll get the most I like the first question.

For non-technical founders without a developer, how can we find affordable developers? And I'm sure Foti can answer this. This was actually initially part of my presentation, but then I was like, it's gonna become too long, so I skipped this part. But, uh, yeah, Foti has two different solutions for this, so maybe we can respond to this one.

Yeah, yeah. So should I— should I— I can get this one here. For non-technical founders out of the All right. Um, I hired an agency to build Growth Mentor. Um, and I, before that though, I did look into Sharetribe, which was a no-code marketplace builder back then, but this was back in 2017 that we were doing the first specs for the product build and Sharetribe was really nowhere as far as advanced as it is today. So I, kind of decided I'm just going to go all in and all the chips in and just hire this agency and build it out on Ruby on Rails. But what I, one thing that I did, which is as a non-technical founder made the life of the devs a lot easier and reduced the amount of money it cost. It's that we created a fully clickable prototype beforehand and Yeah, like it was just, I took the product manager, product owner role. And I think that you could definitely sort of teach yourself how to be a product owner as well, even if you're a non-technical founder. There's a lot of resources online for that. And you know, you could talk to some product people as well. But yeah, in terms of finding these developers, you could go the Upwork route. There's so many ways to define them. And I mean, I could talk for quite some time about that, but I'll kind of take a break on that topic. Hopefully that added a little bit of value.

Awesome. Let's— we're just going to burn as many questions as possible. I'll be over like 6 minutes, if that's okay. So I'll show the next one by Melody. I guess this is going to be tougher for you guys because you have such a unique offering in your marketplace. But I guess for other people who are trying to do more generic marketplaces, what's your response?

This is what I was mentioning, right? That, for example, on Airbnb, a lot of people are trying to do this. But what Airbnb does, they build a mechanism there that you actually, like, whenever you try to share an email, or a link, they block you. So they would blur out it, right? Like, so it's actually like their platform catches it as well. So if there is an email added in a comment or like a conversation between, um, the, uh, the renter and the person that is looking for an apartment, they are blurring out anything that has like @email. Obviously people go around it, right? Because they're like writing the name and then like, but if they are pretty good with it that even like, you know, if some, whatever ends with Gmail, they would also catch it. Like even if you like, you split the words, but obviously it makes it harder because you will have to build all of this mechanism and think about, and probably it will come down in this, that once the product is launched, you'll first identify it then, like, you know, how people are going off the platform.

My two cents on this is that there's no way to avoid this. This is called disintermediation. and you just need to accept it and build a brand that's super strong and have the supply sides kind of proud to be on your platform, on your marketplace, right? But it's impossible to like fully solve this. There will be poachers.

There will be poachers. That should be on a t-shirt though. Marketplace founder, there will be poachers. All right, let's see. I like this one from Colin because, and I can briefly answer this, Colin, because I was 3 years ago or 4 years ago, I got on a call with Foti for this. My process was, I don't know if I actually ever told you this, Foti, but I think I saw a post from Azhar saying, hey, there's a new marketplace on Marketplace for growth people, so go check it out. And I did it, but I didn't understand like what it was. And I booked the time with Foti and then he just explained it to me on the on a call, like what's the marketplace all about and how it's structured. But I don't know what you're currently doing right now. Like, are you incentivizing people to jump on the discovery call still?

I'm going to tie this in with what Mark Rowan's saying about atomic networks, the Andrew Chen book, which by the way, amazing. If anyone has not read that book, you have to read it immediately. So in the early, super early stages of your marketplace, you want to have your pain points super specific and pronounced. So that you don't have to incentivize people so that when people see it, they're like, oh my God, I like really need to talk to the founder who thought of this because this is the exact sort of issue that I'm trying to solve right now or the new type of service or professional I'm looking for. And yeah, I mean that once you build that atomic network, it's much easier to add more. So with Growth Mentor in the beginning, our angle was we're for We're for not just growth marketers, we're for solo marketers working in tech teams as the only marketer, right? That's really specific pain points. So when people saw that, they're like, oh my God, this guy can like read my mind. Like this is exactly my situation. I have to, hell yeah, I'll talk, you know, jump on that onboarding call, the discovery call. So make it super specific.

Awesome. Agata, I think you talked just about this, but I think some people missed it, but like What are some resources on solving the chicken and egg? I know you have a couple slides in there, but in case people missed it, like, is there any good places they can kind of go and, uh, I think it also depends what type of a marketplace you're building.

So I would suggest also, like, you know, to see, uh, like, search for articles. Like, if let's say you know that there are specific marketplaces that maybe are similar to yours in terms of, like, the model that they are offering, or targeting a similar market and just basically like research for articles, like, you know, how they approached it. For example, this thing with Etsy as well, like there is a really, really good article around this, like, you know, why they went with supply first, basically interview with the founder. So I'm sure like for the larger ones, you can always find resources on this. And I would suggest this route. I don't know, Fati, anything you would add as well? Like what helped you when you were doing it?

Yeah, yeah, the chicken versus egg. Supply is usually where you, where you want to start. It's generally easier anyway because there's stronger incentives there. But yeah, it's something that's definitely unique for every single marketplace. So it's, yeah, it's—

but in majority of cases, it is actually the supply. So, you know, so even though there is this like chicken and egg dilemma, it usually is that it is about the supply first. So there are like, yeah, less cases where it's the other way around.

It's the supply.

Yeah.

And I mean, one of the things that you could do is, again, leaning into this concept of specificity and writing these atomic networks, is salt, like finding the exact component of supply and knowing which demand to go out to and be like, hey, I have these 8 mentors here who are in fintech who have solved this problem, who have scaled this channel, and I know that you're trying to scale this right now. It's like you can't just, you can't ignore that, right? If this, that level of specificity is just like on another level, right? Uh, because in the beginning, your, your whole goal as a marketplace is to get a couple of cycles and just get get some transactions going on, right? And then you can just— why? So you can learn and then kind of like decide, you know, what to do next. Um, because my initial idea for Growth Mentor is complete— was completely different when before we launched to a month afterwards. It kept changing. Even right now, be honest with you, like, I'm still kind of winging it as we go. Like, every, every other week, like, you know, our general sort of our strategy is always morphing and changing. So yeah.

Awesome. I think let's do one more question and then we'll kind of go out into the open networking for everyone. I like this question because yeah, like, you know, why are so many mentors offer free sessions? But I think like another way of thinking about this is like, how do you incentivize the supplier side to participate in the marketplace? Whether it's for free or whether it's commission, I think commission's the easy one, but like, let's say for free, how do I get suppliers participating for free? I think with Growth Mentor, it's a really good example because are they just altruistic in nature or, well, that's whoever wants to answer.

Yeah, I mean, there is a me, I can, I can maybe respond to this because I was also offering my calls for free. I'm like a, I'm the example of a supplier because before I was working with Growth Mentor, I was actually a, a mentor myself since 2019. Right. Uh, but there are multiple aspects. Uh, one, The big incentive is the network there, right? So you are actually like for free networking with all of these other people, amazing people in growth from whom you can learn. You as a mentor, you can also book sessions with these mentors, right? So you essentially get the product for free as well as a mentor. So that's a huge incentive because, you know, usually when you work in growth, you never stop growing yourself. So you want to learn from others. Then you actually like have these big networks of other people, which are amazing because there is this vetting process. So actually, like, it's almost guaranteed that these people in real life would become your friends because they are very similar, kind of like in terms of mentality. Obviously, also people who are mentors, they, they do enjoy helping people, right? Like, they often have done this before as well, that they were willing to help out. It's just like they like this feeling that they were able to help someone and this other person, like, they made their day basically. And also like there are obviously all these other incentives that help you with, let's say, getting potential clients because many mentors are also offering consulting services. So, you know, initially they will have maybe a free call and this person realizes like, you know what, I actually cannot do this myself. Do you also offer some services to do it for me? And that's how they would win a client, like a startup client that they could work for. That's one thing. The other thing is that let's say if you are changing jobs, like since the profiles are public, you have all of these different reviews out there. Like, uh, for example, myself, I have 68, uh, reviews, right? So when I would be applying for jobs, I just need to send this profile to recruiter and they're like, wow, like mind blown, all the startups gave her 68 reviews. So it's a really good validation of you and your kind of like expertise in the given area. As well. That's like from my end, but maybe Foti has other inputs. What are—

yeah, you kind of summed it up quite, quite well. Um, one of the— one, I'll just say this one thing that I always tell people is when they say with incredulity, like, how, why would you do it for free? I ask, like, when was the last time— have you ever like helped someone and given some advice where like you blew their mind and just, you know, you added so much value? And they're like, yeah, yeah, you know, I did.

Like, how did you feel?

Like, yeah, I felt amazing, right? So like, that's, that's why a lot of them do it. It just really feels good to just make someone's day, some random person around the world, and just jump on a call for half an hour and blow their minds with, you know, for— so what for you might seem super obvious, for somebody else it's not, right? And that just feels really good.

I can definitely attest to that. That was exactly me 3, 4 years ago. And I got it. I remember I got on call with Foti, I'm like, what do you think of this landing page? And he's like, it's garbage. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, what are you doing? I was like, oh, okay. Wow, that was interesting. But anyway, you learn through feedback. Everyone, thank you so much for joining for this live event. I'm gonna shortly end. Thank you so much, Agata and Foti. I hope you folks will stick around for the networking portion. So once we end this session, all these tables will pop up, you know, feel free to network. If you all enjoyed the session, you know, you see these emojis, like I think you can press 1, 2, or 3 and like, you know, let's see the thumbs up, thumbs down. Okay, awesome. So Agathe, that's all for you. Thank you so much for participating. Yes, I will be sending out the recording and the slide decks. Everything will be sent out, don't worry, 'cause there was a lot of information. Agathe was really very descriptive. But yeah, we've had about, I think we hit about 220 people live and we had about 450, so we had about a 45-50% show-up rate. So I think that was awesome. All right folks, we're gonna end the session here. Stick around for the networking portion and then hope you all have a great Monday. Thanks everyone.