Podcast Episode #3 is live and ready for your ears Fractal Marketing - with Gerard Doyle

In episode #3, we discuss the difficulties in building a double-sided business model and a trick that’ll give you a fighting chance. We then look at how to hire your first marketing employee for your startup and finally, we discuss shoe brand AllBirds who are nailing their copy, humour and brand positioning right now.

Please remember to subscribe and if you have any questions you’d like answered please ask them on Linkedin here

You can find an automated* transcription of the episode below:







So welcome to episode three of The Fractal Marketing Podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about double sided or two-sided marketplaces and how to tackle them with your start-up business. We’re then going to talk about what it’s like to hire your first marketing person and what to look for and what you need to provide them and probably more important than anything else how you’re going to measure the success. And then finally I’m going to have a quick look at a new shoe brand that I’ve completely fallen in love with. So the first question comes in from Scott Clark from claim.io who says, “The challenge my company has is that we’re trying to build up a two-sided marketplace and the issues we face are businesses are hesitant to sign up as our customer base is low and the customers won’t sign up because there isn’t a large number of businesses to offer things to them. Any tips on how to expedite the growth [and income?] would be grateful.”





Well, Scott, I mean, you’ve touched on probably one of those elements in a start-up business that I think is really common [laughter] and that’s people who try to tackle a two-sided marketplace. And the problem with the two-sided marketplace is that it’s such a desirable thing to try to achieve. If you get a two-sided marketplace working, if you can get an Uber, an Airbnb, eBay, if you get these things working, they’re huge businesses. The problem is, is that this huge business actually becomes really hard to achieve. So it’s like anything. It’s kind of like a long odds horse. It’s like 100 to 1 shot. If it comes in, great. You’ve got 100 times your money back. Chances are the 99 other times the horse runs it doesn’t win. And that’s what you’re tackling here. I’ve personally had a lot of experience with this and a lot of experience not getting it right. So I can talk about my experiences directly because my business zippy.com.au that I founded had a very similar proposition. I was trying to reach small-business owners. I was trying to give them a proposition that would work and grow a business at the same time, a two-sided marketplace. So how do you do it?





Look, if you try to grow both sides of the equation, you’ve got a chicken and egg problem. Which came first? So you’re growing that business, and you’re going to struggle. The dilemma you’re facing is absolutely true and there really isn’t a quick fix if you try to grow the business in the organic way you imagine. The strategy I have really come to accept is the only way to really tackle a two-sided business model with any chance of success is actually to try to freeze one side of the model. So when you look at what you’re doing with the business you know where you want to end up. You want to end up with a marketplace where you’ve got buyers and sellers, businesses and customers on both sides of that equation, and they’re growing at the same rate. But we know that’s really difficult to do. So what you need to do is freeze one side. Now, what you’re basically achieving by freezing one side, and I’ll get to sort of how we do that in a little bit,