Adam Kyle Wilson’s Post [Video]

Transcript

The thing that surprised me is when we looked back at our own data, all of our successes. I think literally all started with capturing a large part of a small market. And in fact, I think many of our failures that I was very bullish about failed because their initial markets were too big. And I can talk more about why why that doesn't work if you're interested. But in any case, I think what you really want is to find the smallest possible cohesive subset of your market, the most narrow, smallest market you can find. With users that desperately need what you're doing and go after that first. Once you take over that market, then you can expand. And I think this is true for marketplaces, but it's also true for Reddit or Dropbox or Stripe. Anything we've funded has had this characteristic. The markets that are too big or too hard to really take over all of and you do need to get to a point where you have very high penetration in some specific market. And by far it's easier to get there if you have users that really, really want what you're doing so. Specifically on marketplaces. The hard part of our marketplace is that you have two sides that you need to move up the ladder at roughly the same pace. And the reason that quality generally works more than quantity is the same idea of you need to start with the most passionate users and if the marketplace gets too big on either side, someone's going to be unhappy. So in practice, there's this ramp up period where you want to start usually almost always with a small number of people on both sides and super high quality as in people that really, really.