Video · ~45 min

Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing (How to Start a Startup, Lecture 4)

Adora Cheung · Y Combinator (YouTube) Free Beginner

Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing (How to Start a Startup, Lecture 4)

Adora Cheung built Homejoy, a cleaning marketplace, and here she is blunt that you should run the marketplace by hand first: schedule manually, call the providers yourself, handle payments yourself until you have done it fifty times. That is your do things that do not scale advice applied to an operational, offline heavy marketplace. Watch it if your marketplace involves real world services, not just listings.

  • Run the marketplace manually before you build any automation
  • Doing it by hand surfaces the edge cases software would hide
  • For a two sided service, pick one metric where both sides win
Watch on YouTube ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. How do I run good discovery calls in India when the person keeps saying yes to be polite but never converts?
  2. I run a two-sided marketplace. Do I get my first customers by starting with supply or demand, and how do I avoid the empty-restaurant problem?

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