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Seven Ways To Build A Scalable Marketing Strategy For Startups

how to scale a marketplace business

It’s not just about getting the how to scale a business quickly product delivered—it’s about setting things up so your team is confident and ready to keep building, improving, and scaling long after launch. Development doesn’t stop at launch—ongoing support, maintenance, and iteration are just as critical. Setting up internal systems ensures your team can manage the product effectively long after the development phase. From handling increased demand without performance bottlenecks to leveraging scalable technologies and architectures, ensuring a robust technical foundation is essential.

how to scale a marketplace business

Offering Post-Launch Support to Iterate and Improve the Product

Thumbtack credits up to 90% of its growth to effective local SEO strategies, targeting specific service-related keywords. We’ve collected the most viral growth strategies and effective marketplace growth hacks for you. During development, KPIs like sprint velocity, defect rates, and time-to-market indicate progress. Post-launch, metrics like retention rates, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and churn rates provide insights into user satisfaction and product impact. By focusing on collaboration, open communication, and solid handover systems, you can turn a mixed or outsourced team into a natural extension of your own.

Go to New Markets

Determining the level of control is a key consideration for marketplace businesses and can have a dramatic impact on the company’s value proposition and operating costs. Generally, the more  the marketplace controls, the higher the operating costs and the more consistent the user experience. For example, Uber has a high level of control; they determine the price, control the payments, and match buyers and sellers (riders and drivers). By contrast, Kijiji lets its users decide who they transact with, set the price, and arrange the transaction (meeting place, payment methodology).

  • While Sharetribe handles small-scale operations well, performance issues can emerge when your platform starts seeing higher traffic or larger transaction volumes.
  • Online marketplaces use different strategies to generate community and scale online business.
  • On marketplaces, most of the web pages and their content are generated by users.
  • It includes any insights, from introducing new tools, services, and content to acquiring new strategic partners.
  • This ensures efficient resource utilization while maintaining performance.
  • Then he joined Eventbrite as the Chief Product Officer, just nine months before the pandemic completely upended the events industry (to put it mildly).
  • To scale up to the point when a similar virtuous cycle starts to work for your marketplace, you need to develop and implement a complex growth approach.

Evolving from startup to scaleup

Or you might introduce premium services such as a subscription, or premium listing fees. All of these additional features are very important to add in your investment deck. For example, you might only have developed a MVP with limited features for early-adopters while your product could be https://www.bookstime.com/articles/how-to-write-construction-invoice tweaked and serve a much larger customer base in the future.

how to scale a marketplace business

From my experience working with marketplaces navigating growth, this phase brings on a whole new set of challenges and complexity that are distinct from the earlier phases of marketplace maturity. Hiring people with these types of specialized skills can help unlock value and increase the effectiveness of various business functions as the marketplace scales. If you’re unable to hire specialists in skilled areas, sending folks to targeted training programs can be a good option. Rob Mihalko is a strategy and marketing executive with more than 15 years of management experience with digital marketplaces.

how to scale a marketplace business

Don’t lose the big picture

For example, dog walking services face the problem of dog owners’ distrust of strangers. At the same time, such services have no problem attracting the offer — from dog owners to students who need extra pocket money. When developing new product features and marketplace policies, ideally these will benefit both  buyers and sellers. But where the marketplace needs to decide whether to prioritize buyers or sellers, the buyers should generally be prioritized. This is because sellers adjusting entries are often entrepreneurial and will do what it takes to reach a robust pool of ready-to-buy potential customers.

how to scale a marketplace business

Autoscaling allows cloud-based systems to automatically adjust resources based on demand. Platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure offer services that scale compute power, storage, and other resources up or down as needed. This ensures efficient resource utilization while maintaining performance. A classic example is during Black Friday sales, where retail systems must handle sudden and massive traffic spikes. Scaling within a corporate environment presents its own set of challenges and opportunities.

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