Tag Archives: marketplaces

Four Strategies to Win Big with Low Frequency Marketplaces


Frequency creates habit which creates loyalty which creates profit. Uber and Lyft are successful because consumers need to get from A to B multiple times a day, forming habits that lead to long (and high!) lifetime values. Grubhub similarly benefited from people eating more than once per day.

But there aren’t that many business opportunities that have daily — or even weekly — frequencies. And those spaces have become very competitive. For example, how many food delivery companies can you name? Now add in groceries or meal kit cooking companies. All that just for the “eating” use case.

What if the natural frequency of use for a transactional business is low, like buying a house, selling a car, or booking a trip? How do you create a successful business if ideal frequency is quarterly or yearly or even once every few years? You would be unlikely to create a habit or loyalty, much less get the customer to remember your brand name. That is usually the case. If you don’t create loyalty, then you usually have re-acquire consumers when the need eventually arises again. This hurts customer acquisition costs and lifetime value. This fact makes building a successful business with low frequency extremely difficult.

With a low frequency business, you usually need to have a high average selling price to make up for the lack of frequency. While an order on Grubhub may cost you only $25, the average transaction size on Airbnb is hundreds of dollars. But a high average selling price alone is not enough to become a massively successful business. I’ve seen four distinct strategies for how to thrive in low frequency marketplaces. They all revolve around being top of mind when the transactional need occurs, no matter how infrequent that need is. I’ll start by talking about the most common approach, and then lead into some that are actually more valuable and defensible.

The Expedia Model (AKA SEO)
Companies that pursue this model: Thumbtack, Expedia, Apartments.com, WebMD

My first job was at Apartments.com. We were a classic low frequency marketplace. People search for apartments at most once a year, and there isn’t a whole lot of value you can provide in between apartment searches. So what did we do at Apartments.com? If you do not create habits or loyalty with initial use, users go back to the original way they solved the problem last time. Where do people go where they are searching for help renting an apartment? Usually, Google. So, the Apartments.com strategy was to rank well organically on Google so when people did search again for an apartment, they’d be likely to see us and use us for their search again.

SEO can be a very successful strategy, but the entire company has to be geared around success on Google. This strategy is also susceptible to platform shifts, like Google algorithm changes or Google deciding to compete with you. It also tends to shift companies toward portfolio models at scale. This is why Expedia owns Hotels.com, Orbitz, Hotwire, Travelocity, and Trivago, and why Priceline owns Booking.com and Kayak. When you rank #1 for your main keywords, the only way to grow is to own the #2 and #3 spots as well.

The Airbnb Model (AKA Better, Cheaper)
Companies that pursue this model: Airbnb, Rent The Runway, Poshmark

Sarah Tavel wrote a post about products that are 10x better and cheaper than their alternatives. You can definitely pursue this strategy even if you have low frequency. Airbnb was significantly cheaper than hotels, and many people, once they experienced Airbnb, found it a better experience as well. It was a more unique listing, in a “more real” part of the city, and they had a connection to a local. So, even though people only travel once or twice a year on average, when they do, they remember the Airbnb experience and start there directly instead of on Google, competing with the SEO behemoths of Expedia and Priceline.

Finding this level of differentiation in different industries is not easy, but worth contemplating. Airbnb is not the only startup that has entered a crowded space and grown rapidly by figuring out how to be 10x better and cheaper. RentTheRunway allows you to access high quality fashion without the high price, and without storing it, because dressing up is increasingly a low frequency occurrence.

The HotelTonight Model (AKA Insurance)
Companies that pursue this model: HotelTonight, One Medical, Lifelock, 1Password

There are certain businesses that are needed infrequently, but when they are needed, they are needed with great urgency. Example spaces include urgent care, being stuck in a random city unexpectedly, and fraud alerts. The key here is that someone keeps the app or account live despite a lack of usage because the fear of when it might be needed is so great. This is a hard strategy to pursue, but once the value prop is established, these companies remain sticky despite their lack of frequency.

The Houzz Model (AKA Engagement)
Companies that pursue this model: Houzz, Zillow, CreditKarma

Contrary to what many might think, keeping users engaged in a low frequency business is indeed possible: the key is a non-transactional experience. Many of these approaches have a “set and forget” component to them where they reach out with pertinent information in a more frequent way. Zillow is the first example I can remember that utilized this strategy. Even when not actively looking for houses to buy, Zillow kept users engaged by valuing their existing homes via the zestimates. CreditKarma reaches out with alerts and monthly credit check updates.

Houzz is a great example that is more recent. People remodel and redecorate their homes infrequently, but they are inspired more regularly. Houzz has a great product that shows home inspiration that can be saved and discussed, and when needed, but much more rarely, transacted.This is a product people engage directly with in instead of having to have content pushed to them

For this strategy to work, you essentially build a second product that enables frequent engagement — not a transactional product. Engagement strategies for low frequency marketplaces take advantage of an inherent human desire to stay up-to-date on things important to them. This won’t work for all industries. We actually tried this at Apartments.com, but were not successful because renters don’t care as much about investing in their living situation as homeowners.

A common confusion is that loyalty programs are an example of this. What loyalty programs usually do is increase frequency or target users that have high category frequency, like business travelers in the travel segment, rather than create loyalty from infrequent users. It is still a very valuable strategy, and I have blogged about loyalty programs if you want to learn more.

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Of the four models I wrote about above, you will notice that not one of these is a brand model. Many of the sites listed in the SEO model have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building brands. Yet most travel searchers still start with Google. Brand is an extension of the Airbnb model, not its own strategy. If the product doesn’t deliver on a differentiated experience, brand building usually does not create loyalty.

So, if you’re building a low frequency business, do not dismay. There are many paths to still becoming a very large and differentiated business. These strategies are difficult but very rewarding if they are executed well.

Currently listening to Take Me Apart by Kelela.

Starting and Scaling Marketplaces Podcast

Brian Rothenberg, VP & GM at Eventbrite, and I discuss how to start and scale marketplaces. We discuss certain topics such as the chicken and egg problem, going horizontal vs. vertical at the beginning, and traditional and non-traditional growth tactics to grow marketplaces. You can check it out below or read the summary here.

The iTunes link is here, and here is the Soundcloud link for email readers.

The Three Stages of Online Marketplaces

Prior to Pinterest, I worked on two sided network businesses my entire career, for apartment rentals (Apartments.com), real estate (Homefinder.com), and food delivery (GrubHub). As a result, I’ve admittedly become somewhat of a marketplace geek. And today is a very exciting time for online marketplaces. Marketplaces are evolving online. It’s hard to keep up with the innovation, but I’ll describe the three phases I am seeing, and why certain ones may prevail in different industries.

Phase 1: Connect buyers and sellers
This is the basic requirement of a marketplace. Early marketplace businesses like Ebay allowed you find people looking for your service if you were a seller, or find people selling what you were interested in if you were a buyer. To make this work, companies need to get past the chicken and egg scenario and build trust through their network. Things like ratings and reviews and guarantees make buyers trust they would get what they paid for, and sellers knew they would get paid if they delivered the service. Marketplaces in this scenario also had to find a way to get paid, using taking a lead generation or transaction fee for increasing the seller’s volume of sales. This phase is still in use with successful marketplaces like Airbnb, GrubHub, OpenTable, and others, but almost all are desperately trying to migrate into phase two or three right now, as you’ll see in the following paragraphs.

Phase 2: Own the delivery network
More recent marketplaces, not content to just facilitate a transaction, are actually working to implement the transaction by owning the element of bringing the service to the buyer. Marketplaces know that if they don’t control more of the experience, a great experience can be ruined by things outside of their control, supply side fault or not. Startups like Instacart don’t just allow you buy groceries online, but their workers deliver the groceries to you. Postmates and Doordash do the same for delivery food, picking up food from restaurants that don’t deliver and deliver it using their own workers. While this model is not new (restaurant delivery services have been around since before the internet), companies are now trying to build delivery networks at scale.

This is risky, as delivery networks all rely on the same pool of drivers. So, on the delivery side, marketplaces in different industries compete for delivery drivers. In a zero sum game there, it’s most likely the marketplace with the most demand wins (at this point, that’s undoubtedly Uber).

GrubHub, for example, bought two delivery services in Q4. OpenTable is moving into payments at restaurants. Airbnb is working on concierge services to improve the stay of guests. The companies starting in phase 1 see this as owning more of service blueprint, injecting their brand into the blueprint wherever possible.

Phase 3: Own supply
An even newer trend than owning the delivery network for an online marketplace is to vertically integrate the supply side of the business. Now, you may ask, what makes this a marketplace? In reality, it’s not, but from every other element, the business is designed or is mimicking an existing marketplace. Sprig and Spoonrocket do this with food delivery. They are delivery only restaurants that make their own food and have their own delivery drivers. MakeSpace and Boxbee, instead of just building a marketplace to help you find storage space, built their own storage spaces and will pick up your items and deliver them to storage and deliver them back for retrieval if needed. Margins are very different for their businesses.

The question for me becomes how far up the pyramid can you build a successful business. In many cases, owning supply will be victorious, but in many others, owning the delivery network is the best option. In other, a traditional marketplace is the best option. It will be interesting to watch almost every vertical determine the best model for customer satisfaction, scale, and profitability over the next decade.

The Contradictory Nature of Mobile Unbundling and the Emergence of Niche Marketplaces

Two specific, but highly related, points of view are gaining widespread acceptance among venture capitalists in the technology industry. The first is succinctly explained by venture capitalist Albert Wenger in a post called Facebook’s Real Mobile Problem: Unbundling. The gist of the post can be summed up by this comment: “Mobile devices are doing to web services what web services did to print media: they unbundle.” Fellow venture capitalist Andrew Weissman expanded on this idea in a post called The Great Fragmentation. In it, Andrew goes further, arguing that unbundling might be a core feature of the internet.

A second, but related point, is the emergence of the niche marketplace. Venture capitalist Andrew Parker has a post called The Spawn of Craigslist in which he shows how the behemoth marketplace Craigslist is getting slowly disrupted in a vertical-specific way. Venture capitalist Chris Dixon expands on this idea, saying that the only way to be successful as an online marketplace now is to take a vertical-specific approach.

Together, these venture capitalists describe a future in which there is a specific app or specific marketplace for every need a user might have. Instead of going to Craigslist to find an apartment, movers, a maid, a freelance web designer for your home business, a date, and last minute tickets, a mobile user would instead have an app for Padmapper, TaskRabbit, Homejoy, ODesk, HowAboutWe, and WillCall. The key to being a successful venture capitalist then shifts from finding businesses that tackle very large markets e.g. Craigslist to finding businesses that target markets that could be much bigger with unbundling e.g. Airbnb.

All of these VC’s are clearly smarter than me, but I take a somewhat contrarian view here. I hope the above example points out the main problem with this theory. In the above picture, in order for this mobile user to accomplish his/her goals, instead of needing to just know about and have an app for Craigslist, s/he now needs to know about and have apps for six separate businesses. One other thing venture capitalists agree on is that mobile app discovery is hard, and that the amount of apps mobile users will download and use is limited by both device memory as well as human memory. This same problem faces the sellers of services on marketplaces. With no aggregate marketplace, it may be harder for a seller of multiple services to know which ones exist for which product/service they are selling. Marketplaces thrive on a multitude of buyers and sellers. Unbundling of marketplaces makes building that two-sided network harder.

Something has to give here. You can’t have a future where everything is accomplished online via a mobile device, consumer’s preference on mobile is for apps, there will be hundreds of specific services for anything a user needs that are more powerful than aggregate services, app discovery is difficult, and people will only have 41 apps per phone. I think there is some sort of equilibrium here. Even if app discovery is solved (and that’s a hard problem), the rate of successful unbundling certainly seems like it has to be limited by 1) the amount of space on someone’s phone, and 2) user’s inability to be aware of hundreds of niche services they may need at any time. If you think a recommendation engine could solve this with big data, I recommend you read this article about how successful that’s been for other services.

If I had to guess, I would surmise that user unbundling will not be a trend in and of itself, even if it is a trend in technology startups building new businesses. Unbundling will continue when either 1) the frequency of the activity that is being unbundled is high (my standard would be weekly), or 2) the advantage of the unbundling is exponentially more valuable than the bundled version of the same activity. For criterion 2, that advantage will also be a moving target where the advantage has to become greater and greater to justify phone/brain space as more apps improve their utility. Number of apps per phone will continue to grow, but a decreasing rate, and with that growth, there will be a decreasing state of awareness for both apps that are on a user’s phone and ones that are not. If you doubt this, just think of how many websites you visit regularly. Think hard. It isn’t that high, is it? Now think about apps? Even less? Me too.

So, what does this all mean? Well, my take is that high frequency services like chat or picture taking continue to become unbundled from any aggregate services consumers use for them because of the ability of mobile to create superior user experiences for succinct actions. But, marketplaces that aggregate niche activities that users need only occasionally can continue to thrive e.g. eBay and Craigslist. One should expect only a handful of the dozens of services hoping to disrupt Craigslist or eBay or Amazon to survive, because of fantastic user experience or a high frequency of use. Finally, one should not be so quick to anoint the niche marketplace model as the emergence of mobile presents as many limitations to their success as it does opportunities for growth.