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In this special, one-off mini-episode of Two-sided, Sjoerd asks for your help and reflects back on the past ten years of building marketplace software at Sharetribe.
On January 30th, 2024, Sharetribe launched its best marketplace builder today on Product Hunt. We were featured as #2 Product of the Day! Thank you so much for your support!
With the new Sharetribe, you can launch a marketplace in a day, without coding. You can also extend it infinitely with code. And scale to any size.
Create a Sharetribe account: https://www.sharetribe.com
Check out Sharetribe on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sharetribe-2Follow Sharetribe on
LinkedIn: SharetribeX (Twitter): @sharetribeInstagram: @sharetribeFacebook: @sharetribe -
In this final episode, Sjoerd looks back at season 2. He highlights the top takeaways that any early-stage marketplace entrepreneur can use, and backs them up with outtakes from the interviews.
Besides a recap, you can use this episode as a quick guide to discover the episodes you have yet to listen to or rediscover your favorites.
We hope you enjoyed this season!
If you have any feedback about the podcast, email sjoerd at [email protected].
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A community can be a strong foundation for a marketplace. In the early days, it helps with onboarding initial supply and demand and creates trust. Later, it can form a powerful moat that defends the marketplace from competitors.
But building a community takes time and work and, most importantly, engaging in it yourself.
In this episode, Sjoerd interviews Gene Miguel, CEO and co-founder of Shortboxed, a marketplace for buying and selling comic books.
Gene and his co-founder have been lifelong comic book nerds. They both had day jobs in tech, but dealt comic books on the side and spent their days off at comic book conventions. They also started a comic book blog, around which slowly a community started to form.As dealers, they experienced first-hand how poorly and inefficiently the entire comic book secondary market was run. That’s when they decided to build Shortboxed.
In this season’s final Two-Sided interview, Gene shares:
How starting a blog helped them build the communityHow building in public with the community helped them onboard the first supply and demandWhat a double-bind marketplace is, and why Shortboxed uses that modelHow they faked many features by running them manually before automating themA compelling story of a marketplace where passion is combined with a solid business case.
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Sometimes, the story of the founder can be just as interesting as the story of the marketplace.
In the case of Trisha Bantigue, this is certainly the case. Trisha was born in the Philippines, raised by her grandparents, immigrated to the US at age 10, and paid her way through college by competing in pageants.
Today, she is the CEO and co-founder of Queenly, a marketplace for formal dresses. Queenly is backed by prestigious investors such as YCombinator and Andreessen Horowitz.
Though Two-sided does not focus on founder stories, Trisha's journey is pivotal in the story of Queenly. The idea behind the platform comes from Trisha's own pageant experience. And marketplaces in their early stages need non-scalable tactics; in other words, perseverance. Trisha had that in plenty.
In the latest episode of Two-sided, Trisha tells Sjoerd how Queenly got to where it is now:
Launching the app and getting absolutely no traction for months.The difficulty of estimating your own worth as a first-time founder.The challenge of talking to investors in a way that makes them understand your vision and punctures their preconceptions.How to deal with incredible setbacks, and turn them around for the better.Overall, a truly inspiring story for all of the marketplace founders listening
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First-time marketplace founders often struggle to balance speed to market and marketplace quality.
On the one hand, launching an MVP as fast as possible is often the best strategy.
On the other hand, high quality and trustworthiness are essential, especially for peer-to-peer marketplaces.
Despite being first-time founders, Gaurav Singhal and Dirk-Jan ter Horst cracked this trade-off from the get-go. When they launched their peer-to-peer car rental platform in Singapore, their sole focus was to get to the market fast. Yet they had a clear vision for Drive lah’s customer experience from day one.In the latest episode of Two-Sided, Gaurav shares his lessons on:
Transitioning from a corporate job to entrepreneurship: both founders were working at the same corporation, where they conceived the idea over lunch.Testing potential features with manual work before building them – and spending lots of time with customers in the process. Launching fast with Sharetribe Flex without compromising on their customer experience vision.Working with regulatory limits: before Drive lah, it was illegal in Singapore for private individuals to rent out their car.Putting trust front and center: having raised their seed round one month before Covid, Drive lah was able to turn a potential disaster into a tailwind.Expanding Drive lah to Australia as Drive mate.And much more.An enlightening episode, with something for everyone building a marketplace.
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Marketplaces have conquered some industries earlier and faster than others. Besides home-sharing and ride-haling, one such industry is fashion. The European second-hand clothing giant Vinted was founded in 2008. The US-based Poshmark started in 2011 and is now a listed company.
One might think there are no opportunities left for new marketplaces in these pioneer industries. One would be wrong. In this episode of Two-Sided, Sjoerd talks to David Oates, CEO and co-founder of Curtsy. Curtsy is thriving in one of the most crowded spaces for marketplaces: reselling apparel.
On the podcast, David shares the most important lessons they learned since Curtsy was founded in 2015:
Be efficient: Curtsy reached $25M in GMV with a team of six.Start with one niche: Curtsy started as a peer-to-peer dress rental platform for sorority students in Southern universities in the United States.Don’t force your business model on your market: it took Curtsy some time to find out people wanted to sell rather than rent out their pre-loved clothing.Have big bets on your roadmap: David finds it important that Curtsy doesn’t only focus on incremental improvements.Get the best advice available: Curtsy was part of Y Combinator, which is generally considered one of the best startup accelerators in the world.A very entertaining episode, showing that even crowded spaces have room for new entrants with an innovative approach.
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Jason Bergman thinks most marketplace founders underestimate the power of sales.
Jason is a big sports fan and has always loved working in sales. Before founding MarketPryce, he ran his own sports agency where he tried acquiring customers by sending Instagram messages to almost three thousand professional athletes.
The success rate of the Instagram tactic was pretty terrible. But the experience paid off big time when Jason co-founded MarketPryce, a platform for athletes to find marketing deals. MarketPryce has matched thousands of brands and athletes together. For finding both sides, effective direct sales has been a core strategy.
In the latest episode of Two-Sided, Sjoerd talks with Jason about:
How most marketplace founders still underestimate the power of direct salesHow a change in regulation grew MarketPryce’s market one hundred times overnightHow MarketPryce modeled its user experience after Tinder.A fun episode, giving a glimpse inside a relatively early-stage marketplace growing very rapidly.
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Andrew Gazdecki loves building businesses. He was the weird kid in high school with an eBay store. He built and sold a job board in college. He used the proceeds to start another company, still in college, which he sold before he turned 30.
Andrew’s latest venture is MicroAcquire, a marketplace for buying and selling online businesses. The platform boasts a community of more than 150,000 entrepreneurs and raised $6.3m in funding last year.
In the latest episode of Two-Sided, Andrew talks to Sjoerd about:
How his entrepreneurial journey influenced his approach to building MicroAcquireMaking non-obvious betsThe importance of loving what you doAnd much more.A really inspiring episode, giving a serial entrepreneur’s perspective on building a marketplace business.
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I'm talking to Dirk Fehse, founder and CEO of PaulCamper, Europe's leading marketplace for RV rentals.
Many of us have probably daydreamed about spending a few weeks on the road in an RV. Just get in the van, and park it wherever you want, and that's your home for the night. Dirk loved this too, and so much that he founded a company around it. It's a wonderful story, driven by passion, and started out really lean, as you will hear.
We talk about:
How PaulCamper got startedHow Dirk built it piece by pieceHow they keep quality under control The quite remarkable way how they use insurance as an anti-disintermediation tool And how much work Dirk needed to do to get this insurance product into existence. -
In business school, Emmanuel Nataf and his friends were bored. They were more interested in startups and tech than studying, and so they decided to start a company: a marketplace around services for self-publishing books. Had any of them ever published a book? No! Did that prevent them from becoming successful? Also, no!
We talk a bit about that journey, how they found content & SEO to be their best channel, and how they doubled down on that. We also discuss how Reedsy built a community to support the business and some interesting thoughts about financing your startup.
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Knowing is half the battle, said the wise man G.I. Joe at the end of each episode.
This rings doubly true for James Younger of TempStars, a marketplace for temporary dental hygienists and assistants. Not only is James working on a problem that he knows really well, but he also made a point of getting to know as much as he could about design, web development, and digital marketing after the first version of Tempstars turned out disastrous.
We speak about that, and about how Tempstars got started, how they built a special algorithm to maintain quality, and how they plan to scale the whole of North America.
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For this episode, I spoke to James McAulay, CEO & co-founder of Encore, a marketplace for booking musicians. We speak about how James combined his love for music and computer science into Encore. How they got started initially as a “LinkedIn for musicians”, then moved to a “managed reverse marketplace” model to ultimately transform into the online marketplace it is today. Many great stories and lessons to be learned from here.
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We kick off the season with a deep-dive by Casey Winters, one of the most knowledgable and experienced two-sided platform people out there. Casey started at Apartments.com, helped Grubhub to IPO-ready, grew Pinterest to an enormous scale, and is now Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. In between, he has advised a gazillion marketplace startups: Hipcamp, Faire, Airbnb, Uber, GoFundMe... It’s almost more difficult to name one that he hasn’t advised.
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It is coming. Finally. Two-Sided Season 2. I know many of you have been waiting a long time. A big thanks to everyone who has reached out me since the first season, and let me or Sharetribe know how much they liked it. It has been a big motivator for us to continue. It’s later than expected, but good things come to those who wait.
And boy, are good things coming! I have already recorded some really terrific interviews and a few more in the pipeline, and I found myself learning a whole lot again, about network effects, prototyping, insurance as a service layer, low-frequency marketplaces, and many many more things.
We’re going to take it a bit slower this time and we aim to release one episode every two weeks. If you want to be notified automatically, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatever is the platform of your choice.Also reviews are still very much welcome, hit the 5 stars if you like it, and hopeful that will help us reach more people.
That is all for now, you will hear from me and some brilliant marketplace minds soon!
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In this episode we look back at season 1. I distill five interesting takeaways that any early-stage marketplace entrepreneur can use, and I have picked out the most relevant outtakes from this season’s interviews.
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Ryan Gills shares how Communo got started, why he thinks Fiverr & UpWork are in a race to the bottom, why they built a community that is about giving before receiving and how Communo is building for the future generations.
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Kevin Lustig: [00:00:00] So we literally have a press release [laughs] from September 15th, 2008, you know, saying they were launching this platform, and we hoped it would be as consequential as, you know, Darwin stepping out 165 years ago this day onto the Galapagos. [laughs] Because what ended up happening was crickets.
Announcer: [00:00:24] Welcome to Two-Sided, the marketplace podcast. Brought to you by Sharetribe.
Sjoerd: [00:00:28] Hi, I'm Sjoerd, CMO at Sharetribe, and I am your host. In this episode, I speak to Kevin Lustig from Scientist.com, which is a marketplace for buyers and sellers of scientific research services. This was another of those gigantic B2B marketplaces that serves a trillion dollar industry that I had never, ever heard of. This has been one of the cool things, actually, of this podcast, that I get to discover all kinds of fantastic companies that serve industries I have no idea about in ways that I haven't even thought of. And this is also the case for Scientist.com, as you will hear.
They call themselves an enterprise gateway marketplace, and indeed, they do have an exceptional model. We talk about that, and we talk about the long journey they have been on since they got started 13 years ago. And basically, we talk about all things that have to do with how to build a marketplace for enterprise customers. This was another great talk, and definitely some very interesting stories, so, enjoy.
Hi, Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Lustig: [00:01:40] Great to be here.
Sjoerd: [00:01:41] Hey, before we dive into the marketplace rabbit hole with Scientist.com, can you tell us, the listeners at home, me, a little bit about what did you do before you started Scientist.com?
Kevin Lustig: [00:01:53] Sure. I was essentially a, what we call in the United States, a lab rat. I spent about 18 years in the laboratory doing experiments with my own hands, developing new technologies, trying to make new discoveries. After that, I went into biotech, joined a company called Tularik, which was the first company spun out of Genentech. After that, I went off and I founded a company called Kalypsys. Which was a small biotech company. And it was really my experiences at Kalypsys that led directly to my and, uh, two other fellows founding Scientist.com.
Sjoerd: [00:02:29] All right. And could you tell us a little bit about what is Scientist.com?
Kevin Lustig: [00:02:33] Sure. Scientist.com is a two sided marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of complex research services. So just to give you an example, if a biotech researcher wants to make an antibody for the coronavirus, you know, in the past, they may have spent a year on their own time making that antibody. Today, what they do instead is they go outside to laboratories all around the world who actually do it for them, and they do it better, faster, and cheaper. So we're really a marketplace for medical research. And our mission is to empower and connect scientists and to make it possible to cure all human diseases by 2050.
Sjoerd: [00:03:17] All right. Wow, that is possibly the most ambitious mission we've had on the podcast so far [laughing] but that sounds really fantastic.
Kevin Lustig: [00:03:24] We're thinking very big [laughs]. We're thinking big.
Sjoerd: [00:03:26] Yeah. So you're saying, connecting scientists with scientists, in a way? So basically, you have supply and demand, someone could have two roles on your platform? Do I understand that right?
Kevin Lustig: [00:03:35] Yes. In fact, some people do. Although they're pretty rare. On the supply side, there are tens of thousands of research laboratories spread out all around the world, and they're often called contract research organizations.
Sjoerd: [00:03:50] All right.
Kevin Lustig: [00:03:50] And they do typically very sophisticated experiments. The average order value on a marketplace like this is typically in the tens of thousands of dollars. So when somebody's buying something, they're not going out and buying something for $50 and moving on, or coming back later to buy it again. They're basically buying a six month study that's gonna test whether their drug is active in an animal model for Parkinson's disease, as an example.
Sjoerd: [00:04:17] Yeah. And so you already gave one example, you know, someone would like to make a vaccine for the corona endemic. How does that work? Can anyone sign up on your marketplace?
Kevin Lustig: [00:04:28] Yeah, they can. Most of our business comes out of enterprise marketplaces that we build for large pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Sjoerd: [00:04:37] All right.
Kevin Lustig: [00:04:37] But we also do run a public facing marketplace that's available to the little biotechs, that's available to academic researchers, that's even available to citizen scientists. I mean our goal, way back when we started this 14 years ago, was to help democratize science and make all of these sophisticated tools that are available today available to anyone that had ideas about how to use them.
Sjoerd: [00:05:04] Okay. So actually, I would like to still stick back a little bit 15 years ago, when you said, um, was it 15 years ago that you started this?
Kevin Lustig: [00:05:11] It was, it was 14 years ago, yes. I had the idea 15 years ago. So yes, about 15 years ago.
Sjoerd: [00:05:15] Yeah. So about the idea, how, could you tell a little bit more of, okay, I can understand the environment in which you got it. But can you tell me a little bit about how did the idea come into existence? Did you experience this pain point yourself? Did you talk to others? Can you tell a little bit about how did you move from, let's say, idea to validating the idea?
Kevin Lustig: [00:05:33] Yeah, absolutely. I had founded a company called Kalypsys, this small biotech company based in San Diego. And we had been very successful in raising money, we were very successful in doing business development deals that brought in money to the company. We built a building, you know, to house all of our scientists. But what we found was that despite all that money, our research wasn't going much faster than it had before we had the money. You know, we could do a little bit more, but not that much more. We became increasingly frustrated with the pace of medical research.
And then one day, we realized that there might be a completely different way to approach this problem. And, and that we really needed to turn the entire process upside down. Up until then, we had this philosophy that outsourcing was bad. That real scientists do the work in their own laboratories with their own hands. And we had really bought into that. And then one day, we realized that that was just completely wrong headed, and that if we could turn it upside down and perhaps create a platform that would allow a scientist to outsource everything but the genius, and that became our tagline over the past 15 years.
Sjoerd: [00:06:48] Yeah. So the idea's really that you take a very complex process, like an entire research timeline, I guess, like a ... sorry, I'm obviously not a scientist, as you will hear in the next couple of seconds [laughing]. But where you take your first idea or your first hypothesis, and then you go to some stage of testing, another stage of testing, third stage of testing, for example. And the idea is that you can sort of split that now up, you can sort of chop up the work and then outsource it to other people who are faster, better, have better material, et cetera, to it. Is that correct? Is that what you're doing?
Kevin Lustig: [00:07:17] That is ex- you got, you got, you hit the nail on the head. Right? When you think about the scientific method, it's about having an idea. The next step is doing the experiment to test that idea. The third and final step is analyzing the results of that experiment. And of course, based upon the results of that experiment, you've ... - Se mer
