Tim Holley: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. So speaking of that, I want to chat about the marketplace and the marketplace you've built and things you've learned from building. I think it's one of the, I don't know, maybe top 10 marketplace businesses in the world, somewhere in there. And first of all, I'm curious just broadly, what have you learned is really important to just building a really successful thriving marketplace? And then I'll dig into more details. But just broadly, is there anything that comes to mind? This narrative is still there, but I think we really focused heavily on the seller side, so the supply side of the business early on. And we really immersed ourselves in who sellers are, what they need, and how what they need maybe differs from what the solutions that they can find elsewhere. Back in the day, we were doing studio visits with sellers. We were going to their workshops, we were going to their homes. We were seeing how they make items, we were seeing how they package and ship them out. We were bringing them into the office when we were running hack weeks to say, "Hey, we've got this crazy idea. Is this interesting?" So trying to involve them in the product development process to the extent that it was reasonable or feasible. And so I think that served us really well. We have a very deep and rich understanding of our sellers. And then the next phase and the more recent phase has been, how do we create a world-class buyer experience that ultimately drives sales for our sellers? Because when you have over 100 million items, all of which are unique, you've got a different challenge than when you have 10,000 SKUs that you could kind of find anywhere or on many retailers. And so topics like structured data, topics like how do we help you gain confidence? Buyer this thing will meet your needs from a seller who you may never have heard of. They don't have a brand that you you've ever encountered before. And so we have some kind of somewhat unique challenges on that front where we need to lean into themes that other marketplaces absolutely touch on. For example, customer reviews play a big role in our experience, but they play a heightened role given the things I mentioned, right? Unique inventory from a seller that is maybe an independent person who is a single entrepreneur, it's one person. So you mentioned that initially, the focus was on sellers, which is really interesting because a lot of marketplaces, first of all need to figure out which side do we focus on? Who do we cater to most? And the way you described it is initially it was how do we make sure the sellers that are joining at Etsy are most well-served? And then later on it became more of a focus on the buyer side?…

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