What are the First Steps to Growing a Two-Sided Platform like Scramble?
Scramble is a platform I built to help me solve the problem of finding people around me who were willing to get together to participate in certain activities. For example, it was hard to get a game of pick-up soccer going on a nice day, after work :).
How does it work?:
- I like to describe Scramble as “Instagram for Events”. Follow the categories of things you love doing or follow the people you love doing things with. You’ll be notified when something you’re interested in is happening nearby or when a followed user creates or attends an event or get-together.
What’s the Business Model?: - Event organizers can create paid events which allows one-click payment and attendance processing through the app. As a platform, we simply charge a percentage of the event fee.
What are my current challenges?: - I could use some help with the landing page. The copy is currently targeting the demand side of the platform (event attendees) but I’m still not sure how to target the organizers simultaneously.
- I’m interested in targeting organizer cohorts like personal fitness trainers and video game tournament organizers, but I’m still not sure if these are best use cases to begin with.
Honest feedback and help from the IH community is appreciated.
Hi Elijah, I really like the concept and it's definitely something I would use. I wanted to build something like this just for basketball pick-up games once upon a time, didn't execute on it and since then there's been quite a few launched in that particular space for my area.
I agree with everything Lynne mentioned also and I just wanted to add that you probably need to focus your marketing efforts on a single subject in your area. You mentioned using it for pick-up soccer games, is there other successful apps operating in your area that are addressing that need? If not, you can try to find some in other areas and see what they're doing well to attract organizers and use some of those strategies for yourself.
You've seemed to have identified a pain point with the lack of soccer games so might be a good idea to either start there if it has potential or find another pain point in the community. Could be in another type of sport or something completely different. But I think focus is key here and solving a singular problem in your own backyard with this solution is a good way to go. I really like your concept, if I can think of other ideas for you I will be sure to post them. Best of luck!
This is great advice @harbind! The issue of focus has been resonating a lot from people I have spoken to about Scramble so I think this is definitely advice I would work on. Thanks so much for the feedback. I would definitely love to get more if you come up with any.
Hey Elijah! Marketplaces are hard, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't go for it! Can you tell us more about how many users you currently have? Do you have paying customers already? This might provide more context about what your next steps should be.
As general advice, I'd encourage you to recruit all of your friends and family. Starting w/ your personal network is a great way to get users who you can then talk to and learn from as they use your product. I know lots of people here on IH push us to charge as soon as possible, but I don't know if that's advice that everyone should follow. You can help event organizers to create/host events for free. You'll learn so much in the process. I immediately think of PG's Do things that do not scale.
Finally, I wonder if "Scramble" is a confusing name? It might just be me, but the name makes me think of something that's almost the exact opposite of what your app does!
Thanks Lynne! I agree that marketplaces are hard. But I have a strong passion for this space and I'm hoping this can help to power me through impending difficulties :). We'll see how it goes lol!
As at last count, I have 77 users, most of which are friends & family and perhaps 1 or 2 people who happened upon it on the app stores. So yes, I'm pretty much at the beginning. I don't have any paying customers yet. I totally love the advice about helping event organizers and I will follow it!!
The name “Scramble” originated from my initial conception of it as a platform for spur-of-the-moment get-togethers, like a pick-up soccer game that people “Scramble” to organize in 2 hours or less. But I agree that it could be confusing at this point. I might consider a name change if I’m not too lazy to go back and change stuff in the code :).
The easiest way to grow a two-sided marketplace is to find a way to provide value to one side of the equation first, even if it means doing something completely different than your final idea.
For example, maybe it's hard for you to get event creators onto the site, but you can think of a number of ways to attract people who want to attend events, like curating events by hand from other websites and sending them out to people who are interested. Once you bootstrap one side of the marketplace, it's easier to attract the other side.
Generally, websites that you see catering to both sides of the marketplace simultaneously have already passed this initial hurdle.
Also, I recommend being more specific in your landing page copy. "Find what you're in the mood for" and "Find exciting get-togethers and events" are very vague and probably won't strongly appeal to anyone. Take a page out of Amazon's playbook and niche down. Yes, today they sell everything, but when they started, they only sold books, because that was way easier to do.
The general theme here is to think of your business in steps. It's tempting to try to start at the end, but you have to build your way there gradually and strategically by winning smaller easier battles. I wanted Indie Hackers to be a community site from day 1, but it took me a year and a half before I was ready to move the forum to the homepage. If I had started with the forum as a homepage, it would have just been a dead forum and stayed that way most likely.
Finally, minor suggestion for your homepage: lay things out vertically, not horizontally. People on the internet are more used to reading from top to bottom than left to right.
Thanks so much for this Courtland. I'll get to work on this.