Dan Hockenmaier: recommendation

Transcript context

…This touches on a really common piece of advice for marketplaces, which is don't focus on GMV and growth rates and just expansion early on, but instead focus on getting a flywheel going even if it's small, to show that you can make people happy and you can give people what they're looking for. Is there anything you can add there or talk about? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And the reason this is the right advice is because everything else follows proving you have a good customer experience. Even if you have a very few customers, if your cohorts look really good, they're retaining or even kind of like the classic smiling curve where you see more in engagement later in the life cycle than you do earlier, that's the thing that gives the company conviction to invest resources against it. That's the reason that VCs are going to want to invest rather than a bunch of low quality GMV in a market. Awesome. Speaking of VCs, investing and expanding marketplaces, something that I've noticed is a lot of marketplaces try to find a SaaS business to build on top of their marketplace and find some kind of recurring revenue component and then, in reverse, a lot of SaaS businesses look for how do we add a marketplace to what we're doing. I'm curious how often you find that this actually works out and what do you have to get right to add this other type of business model on top of something that's working.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.