Category: Entrepreneurship
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15 Marketplace Startups That Have Raised Over $50 Million
One of the interesting things about online marketplaces is their inherent network effects. They’re hard to get going (not least because of the chicken-and-egg problem) but — if successful — can become very valuable as it’s hard for other businesses to compete. As a result of this defensibility, online marketplaces have been popular with VCs.…
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How to Hire a CTO
How do you find and hire a CTO for your business? As a business owner you might be looking to find a CTO for a number of reasons: You have an established business and are looking for someone with the experience to help you use technology more effectively and strategically. You’re looking to raise money…
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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’s a Typical Subscription Commerce Retention Rate?
What’s a typical retention rate for a subscription commerce business? If you’re trying to model a potential new subscription box business, or just wondering how profitable an existing business is, retention rate is a key variable. What retention rate should you assume? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” But you need something to plug…
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How to Build a Successful Startup – an Interview with David Tisch of TechStars
It’s 11.38pm as I’m starting to write this, so I’ll keep it brief. The latest startup interview from Grovo came out today. It’s with David Tisch who runs the TechStars incubator in New York. David sees lots of startups from an early stage, so has an interesting vantage point on things. Here’s a quick rundown…
