$40k/mo GMV in 5 months in (bootstrapped) - How I scaled a Marketplace

It's been 5 months since the "official" launch.

We're hovering at around 40k/mo in GMV.

Still fully bootstrapped.

I'm writing this post a 1:15 am inspired by a tweet reply, let's dive in!

Backstory

I won’t talk about how I built the marketplace.

If you’re interested in that part of the story you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZmk0Gayfnc&ab_channel=VascoMonteiro

It’s a full breakdown since day 1 in my parent's basement.

Intro?

Now, how did we scale it to $40k/mo? Let’s begin.

Marketplaces are one of the hardest businesses to get going, mainly because you have to focus on growing supply as well as demand.

This is highly demanding as you can’t simply focus on one or the other.

You have to focus on both - a lot has been written about this “chicken and egg” problem.

Lenny Rachitsky has a great video about that on YouTube

Building the Supply

TL;DR: been in the space for years and leveraged my connections.

I’ve been in the SEO space since 2016.

Throughout the years I was able to build connections and create relationships with many other people that either buy or sell SEO services, courses, consultancy, etc.

I’ve also been selling my services online since 2018 so I managed to build a good portfolio of clients - I had an SEO agency in the past as well.

All of these years in the space allowed me to leverage both knowledge and connections once it was time to launch the (SEO niche) marketplace.

Building the Demand

I’ve been selling SEO services, software, courses, and training for years now.

This allowed me to build not only a brand for myself (I'll talk a bit more about personal brand below) but also a list of people that trusted me and would buy anything I told them to (not in an unethical way ofc).

So when it was time to get the demand, I just said to every single one of my current clients, old clients, every possible connection, follower, and family member - "Hey all, look what I built, it would be pretty cool if you used it".

And that’s how we got the small initial traction.

However, a marketplace isn’t a marketplace if there’s only one seller (me).

And I needed to fix that issue fast.

The Network Effect

Naturally more and more people in the space learned about the existence of this marketplace and a small snowball effect started taking place - nothing major though.

I realized that I needed not to rely solely on my personal brand when the month after the official launch (the month I’d told everyone about Vettted), sales went down:

Here’s a graph:

After this realization, I knew I had to do something.

I guess I kinda already knew I couldn’t rely solely on my personal brand and connections, but it was a good reminder.

Personal brand - helped (a lot)

If you don’t have a personal brand things become 10x harder.

Personal brands make you an authority, people will look up to you and trust you.

Just look at Pieter Levels @levelsio - he leverages his personal brand with insane success.

This is not to say he couldn't have done it without it, but it definitely helps. We all start with 0 followers, but things become easier with every new follower you get.

I won’t talk about how I built my personal brand or what you can do to build yours, that’d be a whole different post.

Even though it's quite small it was enough to get us to where we're at right now.

I don't put the sole success of Vettted on me though, that'd be dumb.

One thing we’re focusing on is onboarding supply that has personal brands as well.

It’s definitely much harder to do though:

1. They’re fewer people that have personal brands
2. They’re more entitled and careful with the partnerships they accept - as they should - But this means they’re even harder to capture, just like a shiny Pokemon

What’s Driving Growth Today

We're still only 5 months in, so the main drivers of growth (i.e supply and demand growth) are still the same:

1. Leverage my personal brand in the SEO space (i.e. reach out o
2. Leverage some of the supplier's own personal brands
3. One-on-one outreach for both supply and demand (cold email outreach, getting talent from other marketplaces, content marketing, starting to dabble into SEO)

That's about it. It's not 1:48am, took me longer than expected to reply to the tweet

Thank you to Andrea for inspiring this post.

Cheers!