How to Scale a Marketplace
A case study in business process automation.
Storetasker, a service marketplace for hiring top Shopify talent, was seeing early success attracting clients via cold email & paid traffic. However, like all freelancer marketplaces, Storetasker had a fundamental issue that eventually blocked it from further growth:
Scaling customer acquisition required scaling critical operations.
In this case, that meant finding and onboarding top-tier talent for the supply-side of the marketplace Previously an afterthought behind customer acquisition, this process quickly became a priority.
In just 4 weeks time, I took this entire side of the business that had a dedicated full-time employee managing it and . . .
Doubled the size of the freelancer pipeline
Reduced hours spent managing the supply-side by about 75%
Gave the senior leadership team full visibility on the metrics that mattered.
Here’s How
1 - Understand the User Stories
I shadowed the team managing the supply-side to see how they operated, constantly asking myself “How could we use technology to be more effective here?”, while asking them, “What do you hate about this process?”
Clients may not know how to find or use the right technology to fix their problems (or even believe that their problems are fixable), but they definitely know what is wasting their time!
It quickly became clear the team was implementing poor data hygiene and failing to implement quick-win automations. The poor data hygiene contributed to a sense of overwhelm -- “What is even going on?”, and the lack of automations meant the team stayed stuck in the grind, never pulling their head up from the flywheel to imagine how things could be better.
2 - Clean up the data
Look, data cleanup sucks. It always feels like pulling your own teeth. For hours.
But once we got it done, we were able to see the forest for the trees. We deduplicated all the freelancer applications and combined disparate data sources into one clean database.
This allowed us to see . . .
Our conversion rate at every step of the funnel
Which marketing channels were our most successful
Both of which we took advantage of in our final step.
3 - Automate the user story
With the data cleaned up, the user story came into crystal clear focus, not just for me but for the team. We broke up each stage into concrete, simple steps that needed to be taken, with dashboards that explained how many freelancers were “in the queue” at each stage.
From here, since each step in the journey had already been broken up into little pieces, and we were crystal clear on what we wanted, the work became almost trivial to automate: An email here, an auto-review there, a reminder text message 2 days later for that step. . all the pieces came together as the team quickly ramped up speed with the new system.
4 - Scale
With the details being sweated by the system rather than the team, we were finally able to make several key changes:
We pivoted all of our attention to our 2 most successful marketing channels, which doubled our inputs while keeping our time & monetary investment low.
We were clearly able to see commonalities among freelancers that were successful on the platform. We then implemented tests for these at the beginning of the funnel, cutting our “conversion rate” to the later steps, but making our overall system much more efficient in terms of “successful freelancer per hour and dollar spent”.
And then everything was amazing forever and ever . . .
Just kidding.
That’s how these case studies usually end, don’t they? But that’s not the case in real-life, and that isn’t true here either.
This was a big win: It ensured that our main customer acquisition channels could remain viable, helped us secure critical partnerships, and made a huge part of the business a well-oiled machine.
However, once this issue was taken care of, the next issue cropped up, and then the next. From scaling Adwords to SEO to partnerships & upsells, there is always more to do in a fast-growing startup. One problem leads right into the next.
But this process, this methodology of finding problems and then solving them using technology? Well, I haven’t seen it fail yet.
“Jackson’s secret power is his ability to automate nearly everything he touches. He consistently got callouts in our quarterly board meetings. If I could, I would clone Jackson 100 times over.”
