Growth tactics for marketplaces
Practical growth tactics that work for marketplaces: how to run each one, an example, and when it backfires.
- Acquisition
Grow by piggybacking on a bigger platform's audience
Build where a larger platform's users already gather, give them something useful there, and bring the best of them back to a channel you own.
Impact High Effort MediumCategories: Partnerships, Content, Social Media - Acquisition
Do things that don't scale to win your first 100 users
Recruit early users and supply by hand, set them up yourself and treat each one like your only customer until the product pulls its own weight.
Impact High Effort HighCategories: Sales, Customer Research - Acquisition
Programmatic SEO pages that rank for long-tail searches
Generate hundreds of search pages from one template and a real dataset, so each page answers a specific long-tail query better than anything else.
Impact High Effort High + free toolCategories: SEO, Content - Activation
Define your activation metric before you redesign onboarding
Find the early action that separates users who stay from users who leave, then build onboarding around getting people there.
Impact High Effort MediumCategories: Onboarding, Analytics - Activation
Build a single-player mode before your network exists
Make your product useful to one person on their own, so early users stay long enough for the network to form around them.
Impact High Effort HighCategories: Onboarding, Customer Research - Retention
Reach out before customers hit problems
Watch for errors, stuck setups and usage drops, and contact customers with help before they have to ask for it.
Impact Medium Effort MediumCategories: Customer Support
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