Casey Winters: evaluation

Transcript context

…The takeaway here is that if you're trying to add a marketplace, it's going to be very hard. You shared a couple things, a couple attributes that tell you that maybe it might work. Maybe just share those again real quick. Take Square, or Substack, or Patreon, or Eventbrite. All of these are examples of SaaS businesses that in providing a SaaS service, deal with the customer and the customer's customer. That makes it a lot easier because you already have a relationship. They already know your brand, whereas, Stripe, we buy things. We don't know if we're buying it through Stripe. It's just a SaaS tool that's white labeled on the backend. We have no idea. I think that's the first element. There's a lot of businesses that look like that, but it is a subset of SaaS businesses that look like that. Then secondly, those customers that you're building a relationship with, they need to have a reason to transact with more than one of your current customers on the supply side, so if you're always going to use that same supplier, there's no need for me to show you the rest of the inventory. Basically, all marketplaces win on, like we mentioned, selection and you needing selection. Then there's, of course, the marketplaces that win with standardization of like, I can get it at any time. It might be from different people, but I know that Uber car is going to be there in five minutes, or whatever. I don't care as much who the driver is. One of those has to be there. You just find in a lot of these examples, there isn't really that much of a discovery need for who the demand side would be in this theoretical marketplace when you dig into it. It might be helpful just to define what makes it a marketplace. In my eyes, it's you're driving demand through supply. That's like the nuance, right? Because otherwise, you're just a tool that they're using to do something they want to do.…

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