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MenuHow to attract users to both sides of a double-sided marketplace (legal Q & A)?
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You could try a "widget" on the lawyer's site which facilitates getting generic questions answered for free.
The idea being that in each practice area, there might be a handful of questions that they get asked frequently, and would commit to answering one-time. It could be used to qualify the web visitor (always a good thing) while satisfying the visitor by providing them an answer. Of course, the challenge here is that most lawyers might only be comfortable providing such watered-down generic advice, that the answers themselves wouldn't be very useful. But this way, you could provide value to lawyers somewhat comfortable with online discourse, while building up content. With enough lawyers and content, you could then expand the service to build towards your larger vision.
But as John has mentioned, many entrepreneurs have and are actively trying to win with this type of idea and have often struggled. CaseText is a recent YC grad that is doing some interesting work in this area.
Happy to talk through your product implementation.
Look to history - there are lots of legal services that have tried this and failed. What did they do or not do?
Unfortunately, you can't always turn something into a viral marketplace. IMHO there are too many built-in disincentives in the legal world to create the kind of viral loops you're looking for.
I would recommend you a blog post from The Family, a great French Accelerator, on this topic. They give you many advices on 2-side markets :
http://blog.thefamily.co/post/67650035686/koudetat-hacking-2-sided-marketplaces
There's certainly many things you can try for customer acquisition -- SEO, ads, partnerships, creative marketing campaigns, etc. In regards to those that are specifically referrals, I think clients can refer lawyers, and vice versa.. especially if you offer some tool / workflow that makes that relationship (once created) a much better experience.
This is how you do it:
You launch with ONLY one legal specialty, like real estate law for example. You share equity with 5 real estate lawyers, one who mostly handles closings, one who mostly handles landlord/tenant court and so on. Pick their brains individually, for the "easy money" questions they are routinely asked by their existing clients and the most routine services provided to their existing clients and become a high level expert in their respective areas.
Their involvement and your commitment to understanding their business is the first step towards getting your new equity partners to generate your content. For example your new partner that focuses on landlord/tenant court will reveal to you that when a landlord has a non paying tenant, that landlord usually notifies your partner after the delinquent tenant hasn't paid for 75 days, so his challenge is setting expectations for the landlord.
Then he/she will reveal that the first step is for your new partner to assess the landlord's situation and level of documentation/correspondence, followed by a 3-day rent demand letter, a summons and complaint and depending on the circumstances a court date within 45 days in either landlord/tenant court or Supreme Court. And then your new partner has to explain to his landlord client that a judgment is only as valuable as the ability to collect funds, meaning the tenant may not have enough assets to cover the delinquent amount owed. Then of course landlords can get blind sided as tenants fight for a "partial constructive eviction," which is essentially when the tenant says "Hey I would have paid my rent, but the heat was off or the toilets didn't work, so I wasn't able to conduct business, therefor I am entitled to reduced rent."
That is exactly how NYC Real Estate Law works right now and understanding the minutia is key b/c you need to share this information to be perceived as an expert.
You can offer lawyers and their clients meaningful value by analyzing what is being done currently, how it can be improved, but most importantly for right now: How it can be illustrated so you and your lawyer partners can be viewed as the experts you are; This is a great opportunity to illustrate these processes/systems using infographics, so if you don't have a designer, get one. Inform landlords how things work and they will appreciate it immensely, b/c it makes for more accurate reporting and conversations with their partners, more accurate financial projections etc.
Showing people how things work gets them involved and loyal, so I hope this helps.
Btw, who cares about other services that look similar on paper and failed, you are going to be dynamic and offer truly meaningful value and that always wins...
All the best,
Gregg M. Kennelly
For a double-sided marketplace, I recommend doing the following:
1. Pick a niche service specialty. If you're just starting out, determine which service speciality can get you the most early traction through secondary research. Make sure your basic premise (macro-level thesis) is solid.
2. Create your customer persona
3. Validate that by speaking with 30 prospects (or a statistically significant sample size).
4. Pivot (if need be)
5. Build your supply and create liquidity
6. Generate transactions and ...
I can go on about this, but I'm sure it will be never ending. Happy to talk more about this, if it would help.
Related Questions
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Freemium v.s. free trial for a marketplace?
It depends on a number of factors but I'd boil it down to two key things to start: 1) What is your real cost to provide a free plan or trial? 2) Who exactly is your customer and what are they used to paying and who and how do they pay today? When you say "online workforce marketplace" it sounds as though you're placing virtual workers. If that's the case, or if you're paying for the supply side of the marketplace, the question is how much can you subsidize demand? Depending on where you're at in the process, I'd also question how much you can learn about the viability of your marketplace by offering a free version, assuming again, that free is actually a real cost to you. I was part of a SaaS project that started charging people for early access based mostly on just a good landing page (we clearly stated they were pre-paying) and were amazed at the response. I've also run a SaaS product that offered free trials and realized that the support costs and hand-holding and selling required to convert from free trial to paid wasn't worth it, this despite the product's significant average ARR. You might be better off providing a "more information" sign-up form (to capture more leads) and let them ask for a free trial while only showing your paid options. I've been amazed at the lead capture potential from a simple "have questions? Click here and we'll contact you" This is all the generalized advice I can offer based on the limited information I have, but happy to dive-in further if you'd like on a call.TW
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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.MA
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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)BW
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When creating a marketplace, does it make more sense to focus on stimulating demand first or supply?
Focus on the more difficult side of the marketplace. For instance, if you think it'll be easier to get suppliers, then focus first on getting buyers - always be working on your toughest problem (aka your biggest risk). You'll find some great blogging on Marketplace and Platform topics here http://platformed.info (read the ebook too!)CM
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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.DT
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