Thank you for this article, Lenny. Starting a labour marketplace for mental health professionals right now, so I often smiled as I saw other doing similar initiatives that we are starting or about to start. It's all about the unscalable at first. Alfonso @ kiintsugii.com
Thanks for sharing this. This newsletter came to us at the right time as we ourselves are building a curated publishing talent marketplace at merrative.com Very insightful with crisp actionable points.
I have many thoughts on this article but one of the main ones is whether you consider any of these labor marketplaces to have been success stories. There is a handful that weren't profiled here that have exited for >$1Bn but that I would argue are not 'marketplaces.' Even a couple of the ones mentioned in this article, I would argue are more accurately described as job boards or staffing companies (who also match 'people with people'). Would you, in general, describe staffing companies as labor marketplaces?
Thanks for the question Georgene! I could definitely have covered others (e.g. Uber/Lyft), and possibly excluded Hired and Vettery which are much closer to job boards, but when I was looking at the space I found there was just enough similarity amongst this spectrum of "places people go find work" to share learnings across them all. I was thinking about creating some kind of 2x2 of the spectrum of job board to hands-on staffing agency but decided that would just make things too complicated. My hope with this post is that founders of any of these types of marketplaces finds new ideas for growing their supply.
Makes sense. The reason, by the way, is that at Fairygodboss, which I cofounded and is definitely a "place people find work", we believe very few labor marketplaces are actually marketplaces in the conventional sense. Companies in this space tend to use the vernacular because there are "two sides" and there is definitely a supply/demand dynamic. However, fundamentally, the transaction consummated is not what you'd typically call a marketplace transaction (e.g. a purchase on eBay, a completed ride on Uber). It may be a "completed hire/job placement" but in other cases is a job application (which may or may not result in a hire) or a talent lead.
At any rate, definitely appreciate the post and the thinking / data you put into this. I agree with the categories of user acquisition as we've basically used all of them at our company.
Great post - would be good to understand the success stories of these tactics - did they work? We haven't seen creative ideas in this space for a while now...
Great article! We're just coming out of phase 1 of building a vertical talent marketplace, and manual + WOM worked well for us to get from 0-10,000 on the supply side (www.repvue.com, targeted at tech / b2b sales professionals). Now post seed funding we're moving into some highly targeted paid and influencer channels plus relying on the growing flywheel.
Thank you for this article, Lenny. Starting a labour marketplace for mental health professionals right now, so I often smiled as I saw other doing similar initiatives that we are starting or about to start. It's all about the unscalable at first. Alfonso @ kiintsugii.com
Thanks for sharing this. This newsletter came to us at the right time as we ourselves are building a curated publishing talent marketplace at merrative.com Very insightful with crisp actionable points.
I have many thoughts on this article but one of the main ones is whether you consider any of these labor marketplaces to have been success stories. There is a handful that weren't profiled here that have exited for >$1Bn but that I would argue are not 'marketplaces.' Even a couple of the ones mentioned in this article, I would argue are more accurately described as job boards or staffing companies (who also match 'people with people'). Would you, in general, describe staffing companies as labor marketplaces?
Thanks for the question Georgene! I could definitely have covered others (e.g. Uber/Lyft), and possibly excluded Hired and Vettery which are much closer to job boards, but when I was looking at the space I found there was just enough similarity amongst this spectrum of "places people go find work" to share learnings across them all. I was thinking about creating some kind of 2x2 of the spectrum of job board to hands-on staffing agency but decided that would just make things too complicated. My hope with this post is that founders of any of these types of marketplaces finds new ideas for growing their supply.
Makes sense. The reason, by the way, is that at Fairygodboss, which I cofounded and is definitely a "place people find work", we believe very few labor marketplaces are actually marketplaces in the conventional sense. Companies in this space tend to use the vernacular because there are "two sides" and there is definitely a supply/demand dynamic. However, fundamentally, the transaction consummated is not what you'd typically call a marketplace transaction (e.g. a purchase on eBay, a completed ride on Uber). It may be a "completed hire/job placement" but in other cases is a job application (which may or may not result in a hire) or a talent lead.
At any rate, definitely appreciate the post and the thinking / data you put into this. I agree with the categories of user acquisition as we've basically used all of them at our company.
Ah, I see what you mean! Great distinction. Hired and Vettery are definitely in the "apply" bucket.
Great post - would be good to understand the success stories of these tactics - did they work? We haven't seen creative ideas in this space for a while now...
All of these tactics worked, in that they had the most impact on their early supply growth.
This post was extremely interesting! I learned so much from it.
Great article! We're just coming out of phase 1 of building a vertical talent marketplace, and manual + WOM worked well for us to get from 0-10,000 on the supply side (www.repvue.com, targeted at tech / b2b sales professionals). Now post seed funding we're moving into some highly targeted paid and influencer channels plus relying on the growing flywheel.
Thanks for sharing Ryan!
I didn't know I was so interested in labor marketplaces until reading this newsletter today! Very cool.
music to my ears