This growth hack helped me to solve supply-side acquisition for my marketplace startup.
By: Emin Aliyev
Tags: Marketplaces, Advertising And Marketing, Startup, Growth Hacking

Marketplace startups are super hard to get off the ground, but once you solved the chicken and egg problem, then nothing can stop marketplace growth.

The most famous marketplace startups are Uber, Airbnb, Udemy. They could unlock the marketplace by implementing some hacks.

htts://murmurcars.com

At my startup, Easymove, we were having a classic chicken and egg problem and for a long time could not figure out how to solve it and understand what is the exact problem.

Easymove is the marketplace which connects people who need truck & help with local reliable truck owners at a negotiable flat cost.

Marketplace Supply-side activation problem statement.

Supply-side: We need people who have trucks and know how to move items. Ideally, that gonna be moving companies.

But with moving companies, we got huge problems.

Moving companies do not want to charge customers flat, they want to charge hourly, want to include extra fees like mileage, truck and etc. In addition moving companies did not like that at Easymove we were charging a 20% fee per transaction, and most of them tried to bypass the platform.

Lesson learned: If on our platform we will have moving companies then it will not bring any value to the customers, and there are already platforms like HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, AngieList.

Our goal was to disturb the existing industry and create a new one without any disadvantages.

I learned that ideally for Easymove on the supply-side we need to have a person who owns a truck and can haul stuff to make extra cash.

Now the big question was, how to find such a person and how should we convince him to sign up and start using our app.

I started to draw a supply-side persona and it looked like this:

Tom has a truck, or cargo van and works for company A as an owner-operator, in his spare time wants to make extra money.

I spent $1500 on Facebook ads, created my audience, and had not got any valuable leads. Most people who wanted to make extra money were Uber, Lyft drivers, and did not want to do heavy-lifting.

So those people could not be Easymove helpers.

I kept pushing on Facebook Ads so hard by hoping that someone will be interested to become Easymove helper.

But unfortunately, nobody got interested and I ended up spending $2500 and thinking that it is the worst idea and it will never work.

It was disappointing to realize that your company is failing, it sucks to get it up to running and probably will never work.

Those days I was reading and learning how other marketplaces activated the supply-side and read how Udemy used Youtube videos and listed them on their supply side, Airbnb wrote the script to hack the Craigslist network.

In growth hacking, you have the term OPN (Other People/Platforms Network ), similar to OPM (Other People Money) in real estate.

Highly recommend Growth Tribe for learning growth hacking. It helped me a lot.

This was my AHaaaa moment.

I sucked in Facebooks Ads and wasted money because did not know where our supply side is hanging out. I was obsessed with finding the answer!

Luckily one day I went to Home Depot to buy new vanity because my son somehow broke the existing one. On the parking lot, I was having big trouble loading new vanity into my Toyota Camry and urgently needed a truck and help.

Suddenly one of the contractors approached me and told me that was watching how I try to load the vanity and can help me to deliver it to my place for some cash.

basically i was like this guy.

Halleeeluuuujaaaah, this man is the perfect fit for Easymove. I agreed and on the way to my place ask him. What he was doing for a living? Does he want to deliver items to people`s places for extra money? Is he able and know how to move, haul, load items?

Turns out that my saver was a construction guy, who owns a cargo van and in his spare time for some extra money helps people with moving, loading, delivering needs.

He also said that most contractors who visit HomeDepot would like to use their muscles and trucks to make extra cash.

Now I knew where to target, and where my supply-side is hanging out.

I printed flyers and was putting them on trucks, vans windshields, and soon Home Depot called policy and told me that I was soliciting their property because people were throwing flyers to the ground.

Flyer distribution was a bad idea, know I needed something different.

I tried to use yard signs and planted them on parking lots and it worked out only for 2 hours because employees threw them into garbage boxes.

Overall this strategy brought me new signups and contractors were interested in working with the platform and serve customers.

We needed more helpers. During that my wife told me that we can wrap our car and drive around HomeDepot parking all day along or put the TV on the vehicle top and show multiply ads by driving or parking the car on the parking space or on the entrance to the parking.

Car wrap would cost me $800, while to put the TV on the vehicle top would cost me nothing.

Next day I put my Samsung TV on my vehicle, used some straps to make it tight, and drove to HomeDepot. It was so brutal to drive a car with the tv on the top and without proper mounting.

We redefined TV purpose and made it mobile digital billboards. I parked right in front of the HomeDepot Store exit and started to play ads.

It grabbed everyone’s attention and most importantly contractors were approaching me and asking more about Easymove.

This day we got 250 signups. And this was only for one location.

Obviously, it worked out and we moved on next zip code. Found Menards, Home Depot, Lowes, and was parking in front of the exit and showing ads.

Within one month we got 2000 truck, cargo van owners in the platform in Chicago and were ready to start to acquire demand side.

Later on, I developed and manufactured a smart display which we were mounting on vehicle top and were driving safely. Then I developed technology that helped me to know how many people exactly saw ads from the display, learn conversion rate, and personalize ads based on geo-location, population density, and demographics.

This is how my next startup mobile digital billboard advertising platform called Murmur came into my mind.

N ow out Vehicle Top TV looks like this

https://murmurcars.com

In the next series, I will tell how we were acquiring demand-side and activating marketplace.

Now Easymove operates in 7 cities and each city had the same approach.

This growth hack helped us to activate the marketplace, and grow it.

Easymove just raised $25k from the accelerator and after that never needed outside funding.