Understand Supply Growth Tactics — Marketplaces

This piece is aimed at the service marketplace founder or supply community manager.

The biggest asset in growing a service based marketplace is building a quality pool of suppliers to connect and exchange value with buyers. I believe a common (yet unappreciated) reason marketplaces don’t find scale is due to specifics in the onboarding process deeply rooted in behavioral psychology. Marketplace founders will make decisions in forming the onboarding process that will shape future of the company. A real understanding of who suppliers are and how to quantitatively and qualitatively filter them will act as your engine or your anchor.

Getting your suppliers to commit to you is a big shift in their lives (in most cases). They all have a job history that doesn’t involve you and in most cases you’re asking them to make a big change. In return you must do two things, (1) offer them a reward big enough to justify their effort and (2) make sure they don’t leave you.

We obsess over our caregiver “Hero” onboarding process. When we started HomeHero, we went through the onboarding process for every on demand service marketplace we could find. We learned the intricacies of each and used that knowledge to build HomeHero’s supply on boarding process. This is something that came up regularly in investor conversations and Chamath and Jason Calacanis talk about it here.

Below are a few characteristics and approaches to think about when constructing a supply-side onboarding…