Casey Winters: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Faire is an example of a marketplace adding a SaaS tool. Is the takeaway there that it's, in your experience, it's generally more ... You're going to have a better time if you're a marketplace adding a SaaS tool versus the other way around? Yeah. I think that's right. I think, I don't know when it was. Just maybe like 2015 or whatever. A bunch of investors started writing about SaaS to marketplace transitions, and that's the transition Eventbrite's going through. It's going to work, but it's hard. It's not replicable for a lot of other SaaS businesses. You need to have a direct relationship with your customers' customers, first off. Those customers need to have needs beyond that single supplier. Usually, it's like a discovery value prop for other suppliers, and you need to build this totally new skill set to build tools for your customer's customer, who is very different from your current customer. Whereas, marketplace is that added SaaS component. It's a customer acquisition tool like Faire, or a workflow, or a retention tool to increase retention or reduce disintermediation. I think you'll see that be a lot more common approach and much more replicable. Is this just rooted in the fact that marketplaces are incredibly hard, no matter whether you start with them or whether you add them? Is that the root of the issue here?…

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