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Clarity

Shams Juma

Seattle, WA

Former Co-founder and CEO of Quantifye, a marketplace connecting elite business experts with small and medium sized businesses. Deep experience in systems and design thinking, strategic decision and go-to-market strategies. Now addressing growth opportunities at Google. Mentor at Techstars.

$2.50/min

24 Calls

19 Reviews

41 minutes
Avg. call

Entrepreneurship Startup Consulting Lean Startups Business Strategy Process Improvement Project Planning Project Execution Online Marketplace

Call me to talk about

Marketplace

For the past two years, I've been part of creating a two-sided service based marketplace that provides business professional services to businesses. I've learned everything from how to determine which side of the marketplace has the most friction, building media presence, understanding the key drivers behind creating traction, building affiliate marketing programs, developing strategic partnerships and executing madly on strategy. I'm obsessed with quality driven engagements and providing a stellar user experience.

Bootstrapping Your Startup

Throw away your typical notion of having six months of funding when launching a startup. Gone through a startup myself, I can tell how how much financial capital you'll need in order for you to launch and sustain yourself, while focusing on your venture.

Creating a Pipeline of Customers

I've learned how to effectively build a sales and lead generation pipeline. I've increased my leads by 80% and close rates by 40%.

Improving a Product Design

When thinking about creating a new or improved product design, there are five things you must consider and it all starts with the goals and objectives of your design considerations. Having built a platform from scratch, I can help you navigate you through those options.

Raising Angel Capital for Your Business

I've successfully raised $100,000 in angel funding and I can share what worked for me. I'll guide you through how to target, qualify and set your frame for obtaining angel funding.

Answers 17
Reviews 19

Answers

Shams Juma answered

When creating a marketplace, does it make more sense to focus on stimulating demand first or supply?

Demand, hands down! Here is how I would do it:

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.

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Start-ups

Marketplaces

Online Marketplace

Shams Juma answered

When people sign up to my online marketplace, should I ask for their phone number in the application form so I can get feedback from them?

It depends. If your target audience doesn't require too much trust and they are willing to provide that information up front, then yes, ask for a phone number. To find out for sure, do one of the following two things:

*Get 100 (good sample size) sign-ups with email only and conduct a survey. In your survey, ask your audience if they would be willing to provide a phone number during their sign-ups. This way, you'll get it directly from the horse's mouth.

*Conduct a variant A/B testing. Ask for a phone number in your test group and see what the response rate is. The higher the response rate, the better the chances you can get the phone number.

So, start with the objective and work backwards by implementing one of the two aforementioned tactics.

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Start-ups

User Experience

Online Marketplace

Shams Juma answered

Where can I get a confidential draft business plan/idea review, critique, and advising?

You may want to consider some platforms that can work within your budget, timeline and criteria. I suggest looking at HourlyNerd.com, Expert360.com and (my firm) Quantifye.co.

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Startup Consulting

New Business Development

Financial Modeling

Shams Juma answered

How I can position my marketplace pricing model to drive sales for Agents?

The best way to determine this is by asking your agents directly. Interview them (either via a survey tool or on the phone) and determine which method THEY would prefer and what THEY would pay for that value (in both scenarios). This will let your decisions be driven by data, while providing you the opportunity to be more precise with your pricing scenarios.

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Pricing Strategy

B2B eCommerce

Real Estate

Shams Juma answered

If you are a marketplace startup, Is there any barrier or loop hole in attracting the early members from the supply side through equity?

Here are my thoughts:

"Offering stock options to the first 5". We tested this and it turns out this isn't viable. Not only will you administrative overhead managing your cap table, you're going to turn off investors that may not like the structure.

My advice is: keep it simple.
1. Define your customer persona
2. Contact them and find 10 of them to say yes
3. After you have validated demand, find the supply to fulfill the demand.
4. Create a few success stories.
5. Rinse and repeat.

Bloggers/writers primarily want to have a dependable source of supplemental income. If you can do that, while making the experience enjoyable, you'll be on to something.

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Online Marketplace

Marketplaces

Business Strategy

Shams Juma answered

How can I determine my ideal customer for a services marketplace similar to airtasker, thumbtack ,and so on.

Since I've successfully launched a marketplace and if I were to do it all over again, I would take a very methodical approach. My recommendation is the following:

1. Create an Opportunity Assessment. In other words, get your thoughts on paper about the opportunity. Start high-level doing secondary research. Determine your Total Available Market (TAM), your Serviceable Available Market (SAM) and your Service Obtainable Market (SOM). Make some assertions about pain points. Create customer personas.
2. Get out of the building. Talk to 10 prospects about their pain points and validate your assumptions about your customer persona.
3. Build a non-scalable MVP. Building a platform is a lot of work, money and effort. Before you go off to the races, see if you can service 10 customers manually.
4. Service those clients and account for your lessons learned. What did you learn in that process? Were you able to determine where the friction in your marketplace is (supply or demand side)? If you were to build a platform, what kind of prototype would you need to build? What features do your customers need to see?
5. Rinse and repeat with 20 additional customers.
6. Rinse and repeat with an additional 20 customers (total of 50).

If you go this route, I can guarantee you, you'll come out really know your customer and how your product/service needs to be developed. I hope this was helpful.

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Marketplaces

Startups

Customer Development

Shams Juma answered

In your opinion, what played the biggest role in the success of your business?

Success is not a destination, it's a journey. Know that you won't know everything; be humble and be willing to put in a lot of hard work. If you're a founder of your business, your business is going to be an extension of you in a lot of cases. For us, it's really trying to measure value creation outside of your usual metrics (number of sign-ups; conversion rate; leads generated; etc.). Finally, treat every customer as if they own you, because they do.

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Start-ups

Exits

Entrepreneurship

Shams Juma answered

What is your advice for building a team of like-minded individuals to help start your business?

Your team is going to make you or break you. First, take inventory of your skills and assess how much capital you have (technical, social and financial). Then, assess what complimentary capital you'll need (i.e. bringing on a technical co-founder if you're not technical). Once you've accounted for the technical aspects, start thinking of what type of cultural attributes you would like in your team (very critical). Finally, write the description down and then start recruiting. Take your time and begin with your network first, and then start expanding to 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

Once your team is on-board, put together an operating agreement (jointly if possible) and Implement a 6 or 12 month cliff. This will protect your business from any risks if things go sideways for any reason.

Take your time with putting together a team. You're going to be married to these folks for a long time.

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Team Building

Founder

Shams Juma answered

What is the best pricing (business model) to apply to a marketplace?

Great question. Here is how I would approach it:

1. Charge 0% to both sides of the marketplace for your transactions up to $50,000. Use Braintree (by PayPal) as your payment processing system and your 3% credit card fees will be waived up to your 1st 50K in transactions.
2. See who you've demonstrated the most value to. Meaning, without demonstrating any value, don't charge anything to anyone. Your revenue are the use cases and lessons learned that you'll generate. While gauging value, get a feel for price elasticity.
3. Once you've learned your lessons, set your percentages (either split or one-sided) accordingly.

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Marketplaces

Online Marketplace

Business Modeling

Shams Juma answered

What are the best tips to growing your audience for an online marketplace?

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.

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Marketplaces

Online Marketplace

Shams Juma answered

Are there any open-source marketplaces available for building websites?

The answer will typically depend on the type of marketplace you're building (i.e. ecommerce, products, services, etc). For instance, you can go to shopify to build your own product marketplace and there a few others. Let me know if you'd like to discuss this with more specificity.

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Online Marketplace

WordPress

User Experience

Reviews

Speaking with Shams was one of the best conversations I have ever had - not just on Clarity but in my life. Shams provided so much more than just technical advice. He provided personal mentorship, a morale boost, and strategic thinking for the business. He was ready to listen, and provided point-by-point response to any concerns I had.

Thaw-Zin Aung-Gyi Source: Clarity

Shams was very helpful! He was insightful and knew a lot about the subject - definitely arranging another call with him in the future.

Alexis Iaponas Source: Clarity

Great to have a call with Shams to clarify, affirm, & explore new/better strategies for hiring & outsourcing devs/tech help.

Karen Bartle Source: Clarity

Shams has a great understanding & experience about marketplaces and startups. I really gained a lot of clarity while talking to him about this industry, the challenges, the opportunities and what I have to work on. I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to talk to him. Amazing experience! Thanks so much Shams.

Stefanie dos Santos Source: Clarity

Excellent ideas, great ability to listen, ask the right questions, understand the situation, and then deliver adapted answers and recommendations. I can't wait to implement the ideas I got our of this call, and follow up with Shams in a month or so. Thanks!

Gabriel CIAN Source: Clarity

The call took a tiny bit longer than I would've liked, but I got some really helpful insights into what kind of platform I will use to run my marketplace on, so the information was really valuable. I'd recommend talking to Shams for anyone who is looking into developing a business with a marketplace model.

Zack Hubbard Source: Clarity

Shams offered great experiential insights and guidance on creating 2 sided marketplaces. He also provided me with structured and actionable steps to begin laying a solid foundation to my business. I will definitely be following up with him as I execute the plan and share more learnings. Thanks Shams!

Mudassir Dossaji Source: Clarity

Shams has a masterful knowledge of the start-up business and platforms. He's experienced and lived through all the trial and tribulations and founded a marketplace so he has a wealth of information, including text book and more importantly practical info, advice and tools to help you with your startup. I'd reccommend him to anybody who wants to learn more about platforms and marketplaces.

Omar Rezec Source: Clarity

Shams has expert knowledge regarding start-ups and all facets of marketplaces, and I really enjoyed the call and took away a lot of great information. I would recommend him to anyone seeking to better understand marketplaces.

Omar Rezec Source: Clarity

Shams has a deep understanding of marketplace business. I learned A LOT in the short amount of time I spoke with him. His communication was very clear and structural and his insights were action-based, which helped make critical progress in my project. Thank you Shams!

Paulin Byusa Source: Clarity

Great call. Shams is very knowledgeable and gave deep insight into the marketing approach for the demand side of my platform, thanks!

Tom Hunt Source: Clarity

Member since April 2014