4 ultimate tips to make your online marketplace soar (5/5)

1. Chicken or egg: the question is key

How do you bring supply and demand together? And all at the same time? The 'supply side' is the easiest to excite for your platform. They are willing to invest time and energy, due to the prospect of a nice stream of leads. It's a bit more complicated on the demand side. For requesters, the added value of your platform needs to be demonstrated even more clearly. It might help to gather the question in the most literal sense. You only search for a provider once you've gathered a request from the market. You reach requesters with a good marketing strategy. You could for instance:

• pay to quickly recruit users (think of search engine marketing and social ads);

• steadily build a solid foundation where you'll see results over time. A great example of this is content marketing or community building, where you — by writing and publishing substantive articles — position yourself as an authority in a certain field;

• achieve a boost or peak with one campaign or event (for example with email marketing or a fair), or

• build your brand recognition and your brand via (traditional) mass media (for instance by advertising in a magazine or on YouTube).

The right strategy depends on your specific situation. Paying for rapid user recruitment works well at the start of your online platform, while using mass media works better for already more mature online marketplaces.

2. Measuring = knowing

What do you want to achieve with your online marketplace in terms of growth? You establish that with so-called growth indicators. Think in terms like higher customer satisfaction, more matches, or more revenue.

Want to read more?

This article is part of a 5-part blog series. Step by step I guide you through what you can and should know about building a successful online marketplace.

• Blog 1: Develop an online marketplace

• Blog 2: No one is waiting for your marketplace idea. Or are they...?

• Blog 3: The 3 basic ingredients for a successful start

• Blog 4: The first scalable version of your online marketplace

• Blog 5: 4 tips to make your online marketplace soar

By establishing good, SMART-formulated growth indicators beforehand, you keep your finger on the pulse. This is the thread along which your marketplace can grow step by step. Precisely in the direction you envision. The next step is to frantically experiment with the right marketing mix. The growth indicators and the experiments are therefore also linked to each other. The indicators are goals or outcomes, and the experiments are the means to test and validate whether certain actions contribute adequately to the growth of your online marketplace.

3. Experiment and learn

No matter how well you think you know the market, no matter how much you've validated your ideas, to find out what really works, you need to search with experiments for so-called growth indicators that fit your unique marketplace.

How do you approach this? Start by mapping out all the ideas you have to grow your platform. The resources and channels I outlined in tip one provide a nice guide here. Analyze what happens on your platform: through which channels does supply and demand arrive? How much does that cost? Are there other channels you can use? How, when, and by whom is the platform used? How do matches come about? A widely used model to gain insight into this and to bring structure and focus is the AARRR Model, also known as the Pirate Funnel. Invent a number of experiments to validate growth opportunities for your marketplace. Organize them in an overview and evaluate each experiment on impact, complexity, and planning. More info on how to do this, read in our book.

4. Pivot or die

Dead end? Ouch. That hits hard. You've invested a lot of time and money in your experiments, but unfortunately, it doesn't result in substantial growth. What's next? I can't say it often enough: making an online marketplace take off takes a lot of time and deep pockets. The road to success is above average long and complex for an online marketplace. But that's no reason to throw in the towel. Think carefully again if there is an experiment you can devise to show that you can indeed achieve your growth indicators. That there is indeed a place for your marketplace. Have you really done everything possible without the desired result? Then consider a pivot.

A pivot means radically changing your model, market, or target audience. That means for your marketplace the whole process starts again: doing research, validating your plan, prototyping, and ultimately converting the current platform to the new idea. Before you get discouraged: remember that the successful marketplaces of today like Peerby and Werkspot made several pivots before they succeeded. Believe you can fly, even when it takes a bit longer to achieve lift-off.