6 Insightful Learnings from Bootstrapping a Marketplace Platform for Creators
Meet JRNY, an on-demand service for photo & video pros.
Over the last year, I’ve been hard at work trying to build a business. Coming from the marketing world, I had a pretty unique point of view.
I was entering my sixth year of employment at a fast-rising digital marketing agency when a single, timely piece of content, posted to YouTube by my now former boss (who I’m sure many of you know), quite literally changed the course of my life forever.
From that day forward, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to build, but I knew that I wanted to start documenting the process of whatever it may be.
That’s when I started writing The Ascent, a solo-venture blog turned top-100 publication right here on Medium. I started experimenting with semi-regular vlogging as well.
Fast-forward to the following April and by the time I was ready to leave the company — and my life in New York — behind, the only real direction I had in terms of a potential business was that I wanted to harness my skills and do something I truly enjoyed.
So, naturally, I turned my sights to personal branding.
1️⃣ Deciding what to make in the first place is tough.
Actually, it’s one of the hardest things about entrepreneurship altogether.
I’m a big advocate for just getting out there and tasting things, even though I used to be quite the planner.
When I first set out on this course, my girlfriend/business partner at the time and I committed to doing “whatever it takes” while we figured things out.
But, as it turns out, deciding what to build in the first place is one of the hardest things.
We knew we had this community of, at the time, 20,000-some interested readers and writers, so we opted to start there.
Could we potentially build a premium offering on top of all the free content and inspiration currently being delivered there? Could we offer personal branding consulting packages for not just this community, but everyone else out there in need of marketing their business or building their brand?
That seed of an idea first popped up and we really ran with it. We started building out our website, creating different branding packages, and marketing our services on sites like LinkedIn.
Then, we started getting our first clients. Within a few weeks, we had 5.
And then, a couple months later, we realized exactly what we were doing. We were very much creating the same type of agency and business we had just left behind… and we weren’t happy at all, which was the biggest thing.
So, we pulled the plug, before it ever really had the chance to take off.
Coming to grips with your first entrepreneurial “failure”
Could we have made a fair amount of money in this business? Yes, definitely. Could we have been happy eventually, once we scaled? Sure, I bet we could.
But it wasn’t something we were happy and excited about building, and that made all the difference to us.
Did we look at it as a failure? No. If anything, we were pretty optimistic about the move. It showed how much we had grown in that time.
Like Thomas Edison, we didn’t fail, we just found one way that wouldn’t work for us in terms of building a personal branding business.
The decision to move forward with the business in the first place, however, drastically accelerated the learning curve for me. I quickly learned that even though I had real knowledge and even expertise in terms of growing an agency, that the consulting and client-services route just wasn’t for me.
So, I quickly turned my sights on something in which I didn’t have all that much experience: the product-services industry.
Although scary at first, this idea felt much more my speed.
2️⃣ You need to create your MVP as soon as possible.
In this case, MVP means Minimum Viable Platform, not Product…
Once I started thinking about my business in a more product-driven way, the idea of creating a marketplace platform became really intriguing to me.
So, I started doing a fair amount of research, during which I uncovered a number of different resources. As it turned out, none would prove more valuable than Sharetribe.
The ‘academy’ section of Sharetribe’s blog, hands down, is the most valuable resource online today in terms of learning how to build a marketplace.
One valuable piece of information I was able to extract from the many articles I read there was the following:
Your first product needs to have just enough features to be able to solve your users’ core problem.
That sentence, along with a short case study about how Airbnb first started as a simple Wordpress blog (both of which you can find here), were all I needed as far as permission from myself in order to start building out this idea.
Going into this, I knew that getting something to market quickly was imperative, but that didn’t mean it necessarily had to be riddled with cool features or contain everything I’d ever hoped it would contain.
No, in order to be a true MVP, it just needed to be something that worked.
To borrow an image from the Sharetribe blog post I linked above, this is how it should work:
Before I knew it, JRNY (pronounced “journey”) was born.
3️⃣ Service-based platforms solve for chicken vs. egg.
Which comes first: aspiring personal brand builders or photo/video talent?
Another big learning that came out of this new direction of ours was this idea of solving for ‘chicken vs. egg’ types of problems.
Specifically, for marketplaces: How to convince others to bring their inventory to your marketplace when there are no buyers yet, and how to attract the buyers when you don’t have inventory yet.
All of the research I have done to date around this nightmare scenario has indicated that, as a marketplace founder, I should first be focusing on building out the supply side of my platform. For me, that means service providers.
By now, I had landed firmly on (and committed to) my new business idea:
Building a marketplace platform where content creators and would-be personal brands could connect, on-demand, with photo and video professionals in different cities.
This, in my mind, was something I could really build.
Not only did it still align perfectly with my marketing expertise, but it was something I desperately needed as well: cheaper access to high-quality photo & video content for my brand.
First, I needed a strategy for building out the supply. My platform would need to solve some real problems for professional photographers & videographers.
Then and only then would I be able to leverage all of the various marketing and PR tactics I’ve garnered over the years (my real strength) to promote this thing in a way that would help it gain real traction and customers.
This also happens to be the stage I’m currently in with this venture.
4️⃣ Become really comfortable with launching early.
Want to save yourself a future headache or two? Launch early and launch often.
The idea of launching something even before I, myself feel ready is a truly frightening thought. However, in terms of making this thing a success, I’ve allowed myself to buy into the idea of it being necessary.
I’ve chosen to adopt an agile approach to this platform, which I think coincides well with the learnings I’ve mentioned above.
To me, solving my chicken vs. egg problem and starting with building out the supply means having to unveil what’s behind the curtain rather immediately.
The process: Launch → Outreach → Feedback → Apply learnings → RepeatTo borrow yet another image from the Sharetribe article I referenced above:
5️⃣ There’s a real need to balance quantity & quality.
Before you let anyone in the door, you need to be willing to build relationships.
In knowing that I first need to build out JRNY’s supply of service providers, the marketer in me just wants me to blast out my product page to the entire world, welcoming any and all oncoming interest.
But that’s just not a viable way to approach this thing, at least not currently.
The next big learning I’ve gained from creating JRNY has been in the way of being relatively selective with who I let in to start.
It is my firm belief, watching guys like Gary V. and Casey Neistat over the last several years, that there is a real market opportunity today for the hungry, young hustlers out there who:
- Have all the talent, abilities, and interest in being an influencer brand
- Have the photo/video skills, camera, and desire to connect with the above
So, while I clearly see the product/market fit for JRNY in terms of its potential upside, now I’m focusing my efforts on attracting the very first suppliers.
Right now, that means connecting with the professionals who live in our first two launch cities (New York & LA) and are already managing photo/video business of some kind.
In my mind, if we can help provide a better alternative or solution for these individuals, everybody else will also have those needs. Furthermore, if the very first suppliers we can get signed up on our platform produce high-quality work, it will only serve to help grow JRNY in its early days via word-of-mouth.
Not to mention the high value feedback we’ll likely be getting. I’m really liking the idea of starting at the top and working our way down.
I began my targeted outreach just this past week, starting with Instagram. It has been highly productive in the way of sparking those initial conversations I need to make in order for JRNY to be successful.
I also happened to learn some valuable Instagram outreach tips along the way, which you can see here:
6️⃣ Follow your passion and try to lead by example.
It’s true, no one will ever care as much about your product as you do, right now.
I’m extremely happy with where I’m at heading into year two of this business journey.
Everything I’ve read about entrepreneurship — the hard work, the fear of failure, the lack of sleep, the caffeine, the lifestyle, the newfound freedom, the responsibilities — is true, to some degree, but even knowing the potential downsides, I still wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.
Perhaps the biggest insight I’ve gained from this whole process to date has been that of recognizing the importance of doing what makes me happy.
At the end of the day, I went into entrepreneurship to build something for myself, as much as others.
I care deeply about personal branding. I also care about technology, and product building, and marketing, and social media.
As I mentioned in the very beginning of this piece, “the only real direction I had in terms of a potential business was that I wanted to harness my skills and do something I truly enjoyed.”
That’s what gets me excited to wake up and ‘go to work’ every morning. It’s what keeps me so emotionally attached to my vision.
And, if I’m not too careful, it just might be what leads me to success.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 320,131+ people.
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