Episode 479 | Two-Sided Marketplaces, Hotseats, Forgotten Subscriptions, and More Listener Questions

Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Today I’m joined by Tracy Osborn and we answer listener questions on two-sided marketplaces, mastermind hotseats, forgotten subscriptions, and more questions from listeners like yourself. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 479.

Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob and today with Tracy Osborn, we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.

Welcome back to the show. Each week, on the show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups. We’re ambitious founders, but we’re not willing to sacrifice our life or health to grow our company. This week, we dig into the mail bag and we answer four or five listener questions. Some good questions came through this week.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Tracy Osborn, who’s been on the show several times. She’s answered listener questions with me, she’s also was the founder of WeddingLovely, which was a two-sided wedding marketplace. I had interviewed her maybe 20 episodes ago if you want to go back and check that out for her expertise. I always like to save the two-sided marketplace questions for her since she lived that dream (so to speak) for four or five years.

We have several different show formats, oftentimes I will interview a founder and dig into their struggles, their failures, and their victories. We have these listener question episodes, sometimes we have breaking news, we get updates from a founder, Mike Taber, every 4-6 weeks. And of course we have our seats now and again.

The 2020 State of Independent SaaS Report is almost done. I’m putting the finishing touches on that. I’ve commented last episode how much time that’s taken. I’m super proud of what we put together, I’m stoked every revision I get back from the designers, gets me more excited.

I’m doing a live video stream of some key takeaways of that report in about two weeks. If you want to be sure to hear about that, head to stateofindiesaas.com and that’ll redirect you into MicroConf to a landing page. Enter your email and you’ll definitely get an email when that livestream is going to go live. It’s going to be about 20-30 minutes.

I’m doing it kind of a conference doc where I’m really presenting findings and what I think they mean and there has been some surprises that we’ve seen in the data and then some not so surprises. It’s fun to cover both sides of those. I hope you join me for that in just a couple of weeks. With that, let’s dive into this episode.

Tracy, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

Tracy: Happy to be here.

Rob: I am excited to dig into some listener questions today and specifically, I handpicked the first two because they’re about two-sided marketplaces. As people heard in the intro, you ran one for several years. I was saving those for when you’re back on the show.

Tracy: Very cool. I’m really excited to answer those.

Rob: Let’s dive into the first one. Unfortunately, it was a voicemail that we received several months ago and due to some technical glitches, I can no longer get at the audio file. But in essence the caller sent a voicemail in, and he said, “Look, I’m starting a two-sided marketplace. Obviously, we need both sides to be successful and only the businesses pay.” It’s a business on one side and consumers on the other. The business is I believe pay the subscription. Which side should they focus their marketing budget on?

Tracy: This is a fun one. It goes to the problem of marketplaces where the beginning part, the start of a marketplace is really hard because you need to get both sides of the marketplace. For WeddingLovely, the marketplace I’ve ran before, I need to get both the businesses on WeddingLovely, but also the consumers for those businesses so that they would have customers through my marketplace.

What I did to WeddingLovely and this is probably why I recommend to anyone who is running a marketplace, is to focus on bringing in as much revenue as possible, especially if you’re doing a bootstrap business, which means that you need to focus your marketing budget on the business side. But obviously you need to have some way of bringing in the other side of the marketplace.

What I recommend here is to look for ways that you can use, the side that you’re spending your marketing budget on, for instance, the businesses. What can you do to incentivize them to bring in the other side of the marketplace?

For example with WeddingLovely, I worked with the business on WeddingLovely, the wedding businesses, to give them the tools to bring in the people that they worked with, to bring them on the platform and encourage them to use WeddingLovely on the other side. My marketing budget was going to those businesses, but those in essence trickling down the other side by utilizing those businesses to bring in the people that they’re working with.

In essence I would recommend to spend your marketing budget on the people who are bringing you revenue, but do your best to incentivize the people that you’re working with, that you’re spending those revenue dollars on, bring in the customers that they work with, bring in the other side of the marketplace. So that you’re more efficient with the money that you’re spending on the marketing budget, but you’re still bringing in both sides of that marketplace.

Rob: I think that’s a savvy way to do it. The way I think about this is oftentimes, businesses marketing to other businesses need to spend a lot of money. You need to have higher quality content, you need to spend ads, nurture, and convince them why they should pay. There’s a huge job, and that’s just the job of any standard SaaS app.

On the flip side, businesses market to consumers frequently do it with virality, they do it with content, they do it with Instagram posts, giveaways. There’s things that you can do that they’re just so different. They’re so different in terms of the approaches. I think it’s not that you can do it more inexpensively with consumers, but I do think that given that we see people selling B2C ebooks for $10, $20 or $30, there’s obviously ways to acquire customers that are a lot cheaper than there are to acquire that big SaaS customer, where you’re paying $100, $500, or $1000 to close that account versus acquire someone for $10, $20, or $30. It’s such a different game.

In that sense, I agree with you and then I would put marketing budget towards the folks who are going to be paying you. I think there are guerilla, scrappy, bootstrappery ways to go after the consumer side of it. One of them is what you said, it’s to get the businesses to bring their critical mass to you. I think that’s a great way to do it. There’s models for B2C marketing. We won’t go there, but that’s what I would focus on as the cheaper and more expensive ways to get consumers to join up.

Tracy: Next question comes in from Anthony. He says, “Hi. I listen to a bunch of episodes, so I apologize if this was covered. I heard a couple episodes on marketplaces and how to get them going from a cold start, but I don’t think you’ve touched on the ‘come for the tools, stay for the network’ strategy, where you build a SaaS tool for one or both sides of the marketplace, and is useful regardless of the existence of the marketplace.” He also brings in a link to a Strife article that covers a little of this, which is a really cool link and I’m pretty sure you can add it to the show notes. What do you think?

Rob: I think it’s a great idea. In fact, if I personally were to go after a two-sided marketplace, which I tell people not to do, don’t do it. If you’re listening to this, don’t do it. It’s just so hard. Unless you have funding, or unless you’re a second-time founder, or unless you really have a unique insight or unique reach, or you already have an audience that essentially makes it more of a one-sided marketplace.

If you look at how Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood started Stack Overflow, that’s very much a two-sided marketplace. You need people asking questions and answering them. It’s both one-sided and two-sided because it’s the same audience, but they’re doing two things. They didn’t just go start from scratch. Community sites, two-sided marketplace is very hard to start, but they brought their massive blog audiences to it.

If you have that type of unique reach into a space, I would say consider doing this. All that said, if I were going to do it, start a two-sided marketplace, I would do it in a space where I have reach. If you think about TinySeed, it’s a two-sided marketplace because you need to bring investors in and get them to put money into a fund, and then you need to have enough reach into the founder space that folks will come to you. You essentially have a deal saying, “Hey, we want to be funded by you.” It’s a tough thing to manage from a cold stop.

I would do it in a space where I have reach or I would do it with a tool like this because having that utility, having a SaaS app that these businesses need, that you either give away just to draw them or that you give at an inexpensive price point in order to get the network effect going, is really an interesting way to do it.

Sean Ellis did this in reverse. He essentially started growthhackers.com and he used his reputation as a marketing expert (and he had a bit of an audience). He got a network effect and built it up—it’s like a social news site for growth hackers in essence—then, he built software on top of that. Actually, I believe later just totally pivoted into the SaaS aspect of it. It’s an interesting reverse model of what the question asker was asking, but I do think there are many ways to go about this.

Tracy: The one thing I would caution, the article on Strife talks about Hipcamp and how Hipcamp now allows you to book private campsites. I’m not totally familiar with Hipcamp. It’s a two-sided marketplace for private campgrounds, but it started out as a tool for people to find what campgrounds are out there, what’s available, and they sounded like they scraped a bunch of publicly available list in order to take all those data into one place.

The two-sided marketplace didn’t exist in the beginning, and we are talking about adding a tool or a launcher of two-sided marketplace. I feel like one needs to come after another, they can’t really do them concurrently because then you’re splitting your focus between two separate products, two different things you have to work about. One leads into the other.

That was one of the problems I had with WeddingLovely. There was a wedding at the marketplace when I launched a tool for people to plan their wedding. Then, all of a sudden I was a solo founder with two products that I was working on, two products to support, and it became really hard to do both. A marketplace is hard on its own. Supporting a tool and a marketplace can be tougher, especially if your tool is pretty significant.

That’s just one thing I want to bring up to caution against. It could be a good way. I agree that marketplaces are really, really hard. It’s part of the reason why WeddingLovely didn’t succeed, especially since I was a semi-bootstrapped founder, trying to run everything myself. Adding a tool on my own plate, did not help the situation actually. That probably significantly hurt it.

Rob: It’s like doing it on hard mode.

Tracy: Totally.

Rob: It’s like, let’s start a SaaS app and have all these other stuff, two-sided marketplace stuff to worry about. Like it’s not hard enough just starting and marketing a SaaS app. With that said, still, that’s what I would do. But I’m a SaaS person. That’s what would draw me to a two-sided marketplace, is the appeal of being able to build a product. There is a little bit of personal preference in there. It’s like know what you’re getting into. I think that’s really the moral.

Tracy: Actually, now that you mentioned this, building the app was me just being frustrated about running the marketplace and being something else to focus on, which leads into it, some of the other issues I had running this business. But it was a fun, different project to work on that would also help my business. I agree on that aspect.

Next question comes in from Simon. Simon writes, “Hey, Rob. I received the TinySeed update. I went through the list of podcast because I was curious about one thing. What is the type of mastermind you’re running with the hot seat implementation? I heard a bit about it on Peter Suhm/Matt Wensing episodes in Croatia, which is out of beta, but it left me curious, maybe you have some more info for me. Thanks and keep rocking.”

I find this question actually really interesting because before I started at TinySeed, I, myself, wasn’t totally aware about hotseats, masterminds, and these other things. I never participated in the mastermind myself. One of the things we’re doing at TinySeed for the next incoming batch is I wrote a little bit of a guide. I thought when I didn’t know what the hotseats were, I’m like, “Oh, but of course. Everyone else knows,” and just rolled with it. But we did find that a few of the founders were also unaware about how they work, so I wrote this little guide. Maybe you can go ahead and give an overview. I just want to say that I feel like it’s not obvious and not completely common that everyone knows how hotseats work.

Rob: Totally, yeah. It’s that shorthand where we get and we talk MRR and LTV, and the first time you listen to this podcast, you’re like, “What are all these acronyms mean? I think masterminds, hotseats, founder treats and all that stuff is the same.”

Mastermind is really just a phrase that we’ve adopted from Internet marketers, to be honest. In that context, there are people that would start these like, “$5000 a month mastermind and you worked with the Internet marketer, and he’s going to help you grow this big business.” I think they have a reputation that I don’t love, but in the startup space, it really does capture this idea of two, three, four founders are getting the other on on a regular basis, whether via Zoom or other video chat or whether it’s in person, really going deep on their businesses and having that implied NDA, confidentiality, and sharing their struggles.

This is especially helpful if you don’t have a co-founder. That someone’s along on the journey that is not your spouse, not your significant other, that you can complain to, that you can rant about, that you can celebrate wins with, who’s there on the journey so you don’t have to call someone and say, “Hey. I’m running this company and here’s the background for the past 12 months on what I’ve been doing and here’s my headspace.” It’s so hard to do that.

In the mastermind context, whether it’s weekly, biweekly, monthly, people know what’s going on and they’re following your story in a way that you can’t share on a podcast, because you need ultra-transparency and that kind of stuff. That’s in general how I think about a startup mastermind, and we actually did a whole episode on what they are. Go to startupsfortherestofus.com, search for startups mastermind, and Mike and I went through that a few years ago.

Within a mastermind, so what do you do? You’re on a call for an hour or 90 minutes. What do you actually do? There’s two formats that I’ve seen. One is just pure round-robin. If there are three people and you’re on it for 45 minutes, then each person gets 15 minutes.

The other format that I’ve experienced with and been familiar with is a hot seat format. That’s where, if there are three people, 45 minutes, two of the founders maybe give five-minute updates; this is what’s going on. Then, the other founder takes the other 35 minutes and go way deep on a single issue or a single problem they’re facing. They ask for advice and thoughts, it’s a white board session, they’re thinking that through, and how can you help. It’s all the stuff. So, a hotseat really just means I have a lot of time to dig into something. You can talk about how we’ve implemented that with the TinySeed batch calls because it’s evolved a little bit over time, but there’s different value from each format, right?

Tracy: Yeah. It’s nice to hear what we do with the TinySeed call formats and we’ve gotten a lot of questions about that actually in the application since how we run our calls. It’s 50%, maybe 70% hotseat format and then 30% the round robin everyone gets a chance to talk. The way I look at it with the round robin is that I want to say people are going to get their problems solved, but really it’s harder in the round robin format because everyone’s concentrating on their own issues, and it’s a way for us to give people a place to talk out loud, to think about their own issues, because there is less feedback when you have short amount of time and everyone is participating. You have less time for people to give feedback.

With the hotseats, that’s when it’s really like, “Okay, cool. We’re going to sit down, we’re actually going to solve the problem.” That doesn’t mean you can’t have that problem solving part on those round robin formats, but it’s a lot harder when you’re telling everybody you have an even small period of time in order to share your problem as compared to being like, “Okay, cool. We’re really going to think over this one thing.”

That’s one of the things that I think about a lot with the TinySeed calls and how they work. Again, I want to emphasize that I totally want people to have their problem solved more on the round robin format, but the shorter amount of time makes it a little bit harder.

Rob: I hope that was helpful. That’s our rundown. We actually have two episodes where we spent the whole episode talking about it. Episode 167 from 2014, How to Organize and Run a Startup Mastermind, and episode 277, Five Ways to Structure Your Startup Mastermind. And I believe that’s when Mike and I went back and forth because I like round robin in general for the weekly or monthly masterminds that I’m in. And he likes a hotseat, I believe. We were going back and forth. Then I’ve since changed my opinions on that as well. If you want to know more about masterminds, head to those episodes.

Tracy: Awesome. Next question comes from Mike and he asks, “Has there ever been any public numbers on how much a SaaS’ monthly revenue comes from forgotten subscriptions or lost users? Those users who are paying, but never use the service/content. As an owner, do you think there’s any moral responsibility for us to stop charging these people at a certain point?”

Rob: Good question, Mike. I’ve never heard of public data. I know that I’ve seen private data across the number of SaaS apps and it really depends on the niche. In all honesty, if you are doing high pressure sales tactics to that Internet marketee, aspiring entrepreneur audience, and you’re selling annual plans, these numbers are 50%–60% of people who have paid for that year, maybe even 70%, and never use that much like the ebooks people buy that they never read, the video courses people buy that they want to get to and never do.

I think a normal range depends on exactly how you measure inactivity, but I’d say between about 15% and 25% is the healthy SaaS app range, which sounds really high. Even right now, I’m paying for a couple of SaaS subscriptions and we’re technically inactive. I believe I have three right now that one I’m leaving for data purposes until we totally transition to a new system, another one I signed up, the trial ended, I’m just extending my trial, so I’m like two months of paying and I haven’t yet flipped the switch in moving something live.

With those, I don’t feel like I wouldn’t want the owner of that SaaS company to come to me and say, “Hey, I want to shut these down because I’m leaving it on purpose.” Obviously, someone forgets about it. Moral responsibility, I guess you could ping people. It’s more about moral responsibility to get people activated. It’s how it think about it.

I build apps to provide value to people, and if they’re not getting that value out of it, then I feel like I’m failing them in the sense that I didn’t educate them well enough to learn how to use it, they don’t know what to do next. That’s how I think about it. I don’t know what you think about it, Tracy.

Tracy: I think this goes from, I can’t remember who, but I feel like there has been a few services out there that have gotten public to say, “We had a certain amount of customers who aren’t using our app. We’re going to do the right thing and make sure they’re not being charged or they’ve been removed or whatnot.” They’re promoting it as, look how moral we are being.

If you want to go that way, then sure, but if you’re a large company, you have the privilege to: (a) remove that revenue and not have to worry about that, and (b) also, we have the analytics and the things in place so they can see who is actively using the app, they have the time to dig into those numbers, they have the time to spend the time to remove those people. Anyone who is a small business who’s bootstrapped or whatnot, that doesn’t have a lot of time, has to be really efficient with our time, I want to say, “Hey, cool. That’s a great moral thing to do,” but I don’t think a lot of small businesses have the time to do that. If that makes sense.

I want to say that it’s totally fine if you don’t feel like you have to spend the time working on those kind of things that is going to lose you revenue when you could be spending the time, like you said, improving your app, improving your activation number, spending your marketing dollars, and working on getting the word out. I just want to reassure that there’s no problem with not having the time to do this moral revenue losing thing as a small app, even though there are people out there who have that ability.

Rob: I think it’s a good point you raised, is just to even look into it, it takes time. And time is the most valuable asset of a founder, especially when you’re a one-person or a three-person team. The revenue is an issue as well. What if you went out and sought everyone out and you email them, and you double check, “Hey, I’m going to cancel your account. Do you want to cancel? Are you sure, are you sure?” That is a campaign on its own. You’re going to do that and then you’re going to lose 15% or 20% of your MRR.

If that’s something you want to do, then go do it. I don’t know anyone that’s done it. You mentioned examples of folks that do it. I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s interesting just to look across the landscape of the way we used to buy software as paid as a one time fee, and then you had to buy it when the next major version came out.

You bought Microsoft Word and then you had it for three or four years, and it didn’t matter if you used it or not, you paid that fee up front, $100 or $200. Microsoft Office was so cost prohibitive that they have student versions and they’re giving it away in India and Africa and stuff because it is expensive. Whether you paid for it and used it five times, or whether you paid for it and used it solid for three years, you paid the same amount.

We’ve transitioned to subscription things, and I think that’s way better for the consumer, because now we can cancel. That’s why SaaS is so hard to grow. When people aren’t using it, you haven’t got that big chunk of money up front. In my opinion, if you make it easy for people to cancel and with every app I’ve ever had, we email a monthly receipt. Every month, you get an email that you’ve been charged this month, this is your bill date, and this and that. You’re getting notified. I’d imagine there’s some apps out there that don’t do that and they try to hide behind it or they hope you forget and never check your credit card statements. Don’t do that. I don’t think that’s ethical.

But if you’re pinging people, when email receipts go out, we used to get a response and it’s like, “Hey, I meant to cancel this. Can I get a refund?” which we would do. We would definitely get cancellations from receipts. If we’re optimizing for non-cancellation, we would have removed our email receipts, we would have removed the cancellation button in the app and made you email support or you haven’t […] call support like Comcast or whoever does.

That’s the way to game things and that’s where I think you get on the immoral or unethical approach. I think what I’ve outlined, which is you’re notifying them, they’re well aware you’re doing it, you’re trying to get people onboarded, I feel like you’re doing what you can. You can’t force someone to use your app.

Tracy: Totally. Next question comes from Poco. He writes, “Firstly, thank you so much for all the great work and resources you offer. Do you know of any podcast similar to yours that specializes or also covers B2C stuff?”

Rob: Shorter answer is no. The long answer is the reason is because there is really no such thing as B2C SaaS. I think Lars […] said this on an early mentor call, but I’ve thought about this for years. What company can you think of that is not an entertainment company. Netflix and Spotify, I wouldn’t consider SaaS, they’re more content delivery.

Even Dropbox, which started as a consumer company, look at their public filings now. There’s a reason they went after enterprise. They are an enterprise company, the consumers that is lead gen. It’s just so we all are comfortable using their software, so that when you go to the company, and they want to sell to a 10,000-person enterprise, everybody’s already familiar with it.

It’s the same reason Apple computer gave away an Apple IIe back in 1980–1981. They gave an Apple IIe to every public school in California. They did it so that kids could learn computers, but also, they were familiar with the Apple operating system in essence and that when they went home, if their parents said, “Oh, what kind of computer we should get?” The kid would say, “I bought an Apple IIe,” they’re familiar with it.

I’m totally open to listening to this and you know of a B2C software. It’s basically what he’s saying, a podcast that focuses on B2C software, please write in questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or post a comment on this episode. Do you know of any, Tracy?

Tracy: I’m glad that you didn’t because I didn’t as well. I was wracking my brain and hoping that you had a good one to respond with. But yeah, I agree with you on all those points.

Rob: I’m sure there’s someone building mobile apps out there who’s doing a podcast. The B2C side tends to be training courses, information, sometimes it’s dietary stuff like I need a paleo meal planning app, or meditation, wellness. I think that’s the kind of stuff that focus on and I don’t know of any podcast that focus on that. Aside from one-off, like if you listen to This Week In Startups, Jason Calacanis interviews founders and you’ll see B2C founders come through there. That might be the one place that I’d go if I were looking for this.

Tracy: I think that’s all the questions we have.

Rob: We’re wrapped up for the day. That’s great. Short episode. Folks want to find you online, tracymakes.com or @tracymakes on Twitter.

Tracy: I’m off to correct you. It’s tracyosborn.com.

Rob: Oh, good. I’m glad you corrected me. I’m confused when the domain doesn’t match the twitter handle.

Tracy: If I could get @tracyosborn on Twitter, I would. Alas, there is another person.

Rob: There is another Tracy Osborn. I went out and bought robwalling.com two years ago from a different Rob Walling, and one of the bigger reasons is I just wanted all my handles to match and I got tired of saying, no one could remember what my website was softwarebyrob.com, because back in 2005, that was what you did. You didn’t just put your name.com, I don’t know why. It just wasn’t a common thing to do and now it makes so much more sense.

Thanks again to Tracy for joining me on the show today. We answered a lot of listener questions. And if you have a question that you’d like to hear answered on the show whether by me or myself with a guest, leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690. You can always email us, it’s questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can attach a Dropbox link, what have you.

Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us by searching for startups in any pod catcher. Visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.