OpenTable

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 29

How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack)

It retained early supply by building a compelling basket of value-added services for restaurants.

Tips

• Add value-added services to retain early supply▶ 13:54Uber reportedly got meaningful supply from converting riders to drivers.

Lenny's Podcast · Mar 30

Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Reddit, Grubhub)

It is the canonical SaaS-to-marketplace case and underperformed. It sold to Booking.com for $2.6B, which later wrote the value down below $1B.

Tips

• Add a SaaS tool to a marketplace rather than a marketplace to SaaS▶ 58:00Eventbrite drives about 25 percent of its own ticket sales, growing faster than the rest of the business, and Casey says it likely needs to approach 50 percent to unlock cross-side effects.

Lenny's Podcast · Oct 9

Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier

It followed the classic playbook of bootstrapping with SaaS and then becoming a marketplace.