Marketplaces, Scarcity, Execution ⚡
👋 Welcome!
Boris Wertz shares a thread on the question marketplace founders and makers often ask themselves. What side of the marketplace should I focus on? His answer is “both, but at different times.” First, you need to bootstrap the initial supply. Good strategies for this can be found in Lenny Rachitsky’s Newsletter How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business. But competition doesn’t wait, “so after initially focusing on supply, you now need to shift all of your attention to the demand side.” Boris goes on that, “you can only build a lasting moat by capturing buyers' mindshare and hence aggregating demand.” And how do you win mindshare? A key strategy is to “maximize happiness” of your marketplace participants. The process of building a two-sided marketplace is complex. You need to be clear what to focus at what stage. Boris concludes, that “supply is most important when you start,” but “aggregating demand is the only long-term moat.” Read the full thread with links to supporting docs.
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🚀 Maker News
Scarcity Signals
Great thread by Marc Köhlbrugge on scarcity signals around lifetime deals and how effective they are when trying to build a long-term business. For most, it’s a way to get the most value from you. They know that if they sell you a monthly subscription you could cancel the next day. Therefore, they offer flexible refund policies, as you could issue a chargeback the next day. This removes the pressure and customers usually end up forgetting. These practices are not always malicious and often make more sense than recurring subscriptions. From the book SPIN Selling, he explains “how closing techniques only tend to work for one-off, low-value deals.” Read the full thread.
Sivers Podcast
I briefly tweeted yesterday about Siver’s thinking on Ideas vs Execution from the brilliant podcast with Derek Sivers and Shane Parrish from The Knowledge Project. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole podcast (105 mins), Dickie Bush has done a great job below of capturing and summarising the key learnings from the episode. Read the full thread or Dickie’s notes on Notion. You can find the podcast here.
Validate Ideas
In a recent post on Indie Hackers, Kevin Conti shares a Notion template for validating ideas. He used the template for his project softwareideas.io to manage all of his customer conversations, identifying insights to de-risk his business idea and pre-sell over $200 of his product before launch. The template contains two parts. The first is a table for customer interviews and acts as a small CRM. The second is a risks and hypotheses table. This lets you capture the big-picture of your customer conversations, allowing you to keep track of risks as you move through and mitigate or validate them. Read the full post and view/duplicate the Notion template.
💭 Afterthought
To finish the day, an enthusiastic tweet below by Jordan O’Connor on how to build a niche which you can sell products to. He believes you could do this even with 50 or 20 articles. “The quality is what's important (for SEO and brand authority), but you also want to be continuously shipping.” Take care and see you tomorrow!
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