Author: Matt Collins
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How Hired.com Started a Fast-Growing Careers Marketplace
If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and has raised over $70 million in funding.…
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7 Frameworks For Predicting Online Marketplace Success
What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental differences between the industries they chose to play in or their precise business models? What…
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How Thumbtack Built a Huge Local Services Marketplace
How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs. So how did Thumbtack get where they are? What tactics are behind their apparent success? The founder of…
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What is the Average Churn Rate for a Subscription Box Business?
What churn rate can you expect for your subscription box business? What’s a good churn rate? What’s a bad churn rate? If you haven’t yet launched, what number should you put in your business plan? I wrote in a previous post about typical subscription e-commerce retention rates and how, when considering launching a subscription box businesses, your assumptions about retention…
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How to Find a Good WordPress Developer on oDesk
You have a WordPress blog or website. You want some changes made to it, so you need to find someone who can help. But who? One effective way to find a WordPress developer is through a freelancing website like oDesk or Elance. But finding the right person can be very time-consuming and error-prone. How do…
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Skillshare: How to Build a Marketplace for Online Education
I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll up your sleeves up and…
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What Makes a Good Ecommerce 2.0 Startup?
PandoDaily have been running a series of articles lately on ‘ecommerce 2.0’, featuring video clips from a dinner with the CEOs of some of the top ecommerce startups: Birchbox, Warby Parker, One Kings Lane and Jack Threads. I’ve rounded up the clips from the series here as they’re worth a watch if you’re interested in…
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Our Share of Visits from iPads is up 23% Since Christmas
iPad Share of Visits Up 23% In the month before Christmas, 13.2% of our unique visits came from iPads. In the seven days since Christmas, that has leapt to 16.2%. That’s a whopping 23% increase in a matter of weeks. I guess plenty of our customers received iPads for Christmas! Is It Just Technophiles? Who…
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Magento E-Commerce Checkout Conversion Rates
Screen Pages, a UK ecommerce agency, publish some great data on their blog. Their latest post is about Magento e-commerce checkout conversion rates. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons: It gives some useful benchmark conversion rate numbers. It shows how conversion rates can and do vary significantly between sites with checkouts that are functionally…
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Perceived Value vs. True Value: Is There a Difference?
This is a great TED talk: Rory Sutherland makes an entertaining case for thinking more about psychology in the way we design and enhance things (and less about technology). One example: one of the best improvements to the London Underground in ROI terms did nothing to change the trains or how they ran. Instead, it…
