Tim Holley: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So many natural advantages to getting this marketplace off the ground. How cool is that? You mentioned word of mouth as a big part of how Etsy started spreading. I imagine even today there's a lot of just, "Hey, you should check out Etsy." Is there anything you've done that accelerates word of mouth or build on word of mouth, referrals comes to mind? Is there anything along those lines? Yeah, we dabbled with referral programs a while ago, probably eight some years ago. What we saw, it was a different time. And so I think we maybe didn't value a new buyer, for example, in the way we do today. Because to some degree, you're unlocking future value. They make a single purchase, and then the bet is over time they'll go on to make subsequent purchases. We didn't necessarily have that as deep an understanding then as we do now. So our buyer referral program ultimately wasn't a huge success. But on the seller side, this was back in the days of Dropbox referral program being a huge, huge driver of their growth, and the whole get concept that was really prevalent back then. And on the seller side, one of the things that we really leaned into was, on Etsy, for those who aren't familiar, it costs 20 cents to list an item. And that may seem like a very small financial outlay to get started, but it's a little bit of a barrier. And the more we can do to remove those, the higher chance that someone will either become a seller or list more items. So we really leaned into that as the currency for the seller referral program. And coming back to what I said around Teams, that was a really great way to supercharge some of that activity that was either happening, but more of it could happen, or really helping a seller understand, "Oh yeah, there is a hook here. If I offer this person, I refer them, they'll get some listing credits. It'll be easier for them to open their shop. And then when I need to list more items, I also have credits that I can apply." So that was one small area. I wouldn't say it was a huge driver of growth. But in certain markets, in certain pockets, we saw it work pretty well. Awesome. That also helps with fraud, which is a huge problem with referral programs where the credit is just, you can list on Etsy. It's not like you can steal a lot of money away from the business. So that's clever.…

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