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MenuWhat are the best tips to growing your audience for an online marketplace?
I'd like to find out more about growing your audience for an online marketplace. What is the best way to approach growth?
Answers
As mentioned, it depends on what your specific goals are and what kind of marketplace we're dealing with. I know the best practices / approach we used at Skillshare, but let me know if you have a more specific question.
As the others said, it can vary but I have found that one of the fastest ways to grow an audience is to give away some related knowledge. For me, this was creating online courses to provide for free in the areas of photography and online marketing. It does not take a lot of time to do a screencast or a couple of videos teaching something and there are plenty of marketplaces for online learning that have students wanting your content. From two courses I have just shy of 30,000 students and it's still growing. Once you have a decent audience who you trusts you because of what you have taught them, you can ask them to check out your offerings at other marketplaces.
It depends on your niche, industry, what your goals are, who your market is, and so on. There is no "one size fits all" answer. Feel free to set up a call to discuss your needs and get "real" answers instead of dangerously ineffective cookie cutter answers.
The beauty of a "two-sided" marketplace. I can actually tell you how we started ours. I actually wrote a post, but in essence we "seeded" one side of the marketplace with our own video courses. This built confidence "enough" to the point other authors were "enticed" to upload content to our site. Today we have more 500,000 registered students and receive about 1M uniques per month.
Glad to hop on a call and dig deeper or just read my post on how we started: http://blog.tareasplus.com/startup-leveraged-youtube-create-marketplace-500000-subscribers/
Focus on one niche and find out what your audience values the most. Then, build content around using inbound marketing. Remember, SEO rules have changed. So you can't just take content from another site and republish on yours. You'll actually lose points doing this and your ratings will suffer.
Hello!
Hope you have a nice day.
I will appreciate if you tell me what industry your marketplace relates to, it will help to give more specific advice.
In general, here are some tips for growing the audience of your marketplace.
Storytelling
Storytelling - this is what will build a strong community around your marketplace and saturate it with the ideas.
You can encourage your users to write blog posts about their experience renting a car and reward those with the best stories.
Partner with other businesses
A partnership is a great way to create a word of mouth for your product and promote it to a wider audience.
Scale the functionality
First of all, listen to your customers. Gather their feedbacks and, when growing your product, primarily add the features that your users request.
Organize events
Industry-related events are a great way to create a word of mouth for your business and unite people around the same idea.
Related Questions
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How important is it for a marketplace startup to drive enough demand (customers) for your supply (sellers) to make a full time living off of it?
It's very important. (first, read this article by Josh Breinlinger - http://acrowdedspace.com/post/47647912203/a-critical-but-ignored-metric-for-marketplaces) The way you achieve success in a marketplace is by driving liquidity for both your supply & demand. Demand-side Liquidity = When users come to your marketplace, they can achieve their goals. Supply-side Liquidity = When supply comes to your marketplace they can achieve their goals... which are almost always to make money. If you're making a large amount of your supply-side users a full-time income, then you're helping them achieve liquidity. Now it's not so black and white and it doesn't always have to be a "full-time income." It depends what their goals are. E.g., 1) At Airbnb, renters aren't looking to quit their day jobs and become landlords full-time... they're just look to earn a substantial amount of income to offset their rent, mortgage, etc. So in this case, I would probably goal on # of renters that earn >$500 / month... and (in the first 1-5 years) try to grow this number by 10-20% MoM... and maybe by just 5% once you're in the mid-high tens of millions in yearly revenue. 2) At Kickstarter, the goal of the supply-side is to get their project successfully funded. They don't care if the project creator is "full-time"... they just want to make sure they meet their funding goal. This is why they talk about their 44% project success rate all the time - http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats 3) At Udemy, our instructors want a substantial amount of their income to be driven from their Udemy course earnings... so we look at how many instructors are earning >$2k / month.Dinesh ThiruDT
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Broad niche or Targeted niche which way to go?
I always suggest going "uncomfortably narrow" initially so that you can really dial in the user experience and build liquidity first. Going broad will be tougher as there's too much noise to signal. Also, it's best to fake the supply side initially of you can to improve the buyers side first, then figure out supply & quality afterwards if customers are buying and you've proven out a demand strategy that will work.Dan MartellDM
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Holding funds in a 2-sided marketplace?
Check out https://www.balancedpayments.com/ They are made for marketplaces. Airbnb CEO among others invested in them and they have some of the best pricing/payout fees. Also some good info on http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/2013/10/08/online-marketplaces-are-hard/ One of Balanced Payments co-founders is writing this blog series on marketplaces.Mikeal AbramoffMA
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When recording income for a marketplace startup, is it typical to use the gross transaction or just the fees collected per payment?
You usually only recognize the commissions as revenues and use the term "Gross Merchandise Value" (GMV) to describe the size of the marketplace (value of all transactions going through the site)Boris WertzBW
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What is the best pricing (business model) to apply to a marketplace?
I like to separate your question into 2 sub-questions: #1 How do we determine which side to charge? #2 How much is the right amount to charge? On #1, my answer is that you can charge the side(s) for whom you add the most value. In your examples, Uber really solves a big problem for drivers, it's that they sit idle for a good part of the day, so are willing to pay a lot for new leads. (their alternative is no work) Consumers are charged more for the convenience of a private car but they are probably not so much willing to pay more for a taxi, even if they can hail one from their phones. For AirBnB, it's a mix, it's a way for landlords to monetize idle capacity which they are willing to pay for, but it's also a way for a renter to pay less than they would normally pay for a hotel. On #2 (how much), I like to triangulate a number of factors: - What's the maximum amount I can charge one side, while still being a good deal for them. - How much do I need to charge so that I can become profitable? (the economics are quite different if you charge 3% vs. 12%) - What are comparable services charging for substitutes/competitive offerings? I will just add that there is no formulaic way to determine pricing strategies (curated vs. open), and it's a lot more about what's the comparable and what the value delivered is. That's how I approached the question while deciding the business model at ProBueno.com (my startup)Michel RbeizMR
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