We recently booked gig number 40,000 at Encore!
How have we done it?
4 strategies for marketplace founders
🛠️ Automate everything: your team will thank you for it
We’ve spent years streamlining every single part of our business. Our developers play a core role in this, and our Ops team use tools like Zapier religiously. This frees your sales and support people from monotonous admin work, accelerates your pipeline velocity, and provides a smoother experience for suppliers.
⭐ Take quality seriously
In the early days, we thought that the best suppliers would naturally rise to the top of our rankings, and we didn’t curate our supply. This turned out to reward the most tenacious suppliers, not the most talented. We did a big U-turn in 2018. We now use a combination of marketplace performance signals (like response time and review score) along with an “audition process” for vetting new musicians and stratifying them. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a helluva lot better than relying solely on which suppliers engage most with the platform.
🧑🔬 Test, test, test
We try to treat every change at Encore as an experiment with:
• A hypothesis
• A success threshold
• An objective debrief
This is easier said than done, but when it’s followed properly, it’s incredibly satisfying to see clear winners.
💀 Every startup has it’s do-or-die moments: grit your teeth & push through them
For us, it was the pandemic. Our April 2020 booking numbers fell to 10% of February 2020, and I remember one of our investors saying to us:
“I’m not going to give you the funeral speech just yet, but this is pretty bleak.”
Every company will hit seemingly insurmountable challenges. Find a way to weather the storm.
In the words of Admiral Stockdale:
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
