Learnings from chat with Ved

On Market Places

  • The main challenge of scaling UpWork is the variability of the service
    • Lyft and Uber’s model – getting you from point A to B
    • UpWork connects you with contractor who does consulting work and the quality varies based on service provider
  • Scaling a market place that is digital is easier than scaling one that is service based
    • border crossing is performed easily
    • Uber spends a lot of money entering into each new territory because it is  building a new market place each time
  • Performing Market Segmentation helps understand which segment is growing
  • Growth is the new marketing
    • marketers which are focus on traditional channels of marketing will have a hard time transitioning to digital channels
    • 1st principal approach to funnel analysis and conversion rates optimization
      • understand where they are dropping
      • understand the user psychology behind why they are dropping off

Elderly-care marketplace

  • Founding approach
    • raised money from ex-colleagues
    • founded team with 2 ex-colleagues
  • Reason for starting elderly care marketplace
    • Did a bottoms up analysis – more folks listing tasks to be done for elderly on UpWork
    • Did a top down analysis – aging baby boomer
    • UpWork is focused on the digital tasks while elderly care is an offline tasks
  • Reasons for shutting down
    • well funded entrants
    • real service is harder to scale than digital service
    • quality variability of service provider
    • difficulty in quantifying trust that can be translated from one customer to another – its a highly personal service

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