Podcast

Ritesh Agarwal on Building OYO, the Decacorn of India's Hotel Industry

Ritesh Agarwal, hosted by Anand Daniel · SeedToScale (Accel India) Free Intermediate India

Agarwal describes how OYO had to define its ideal hotel partner precisely, small, underperforming, willing to be upgraded, before it could promise a consistent experience to the demand side. It is a useful Indian example of picking the harder, more fragmented side, thousands of small independent hotel owners, as the anchor. Listen for how narrowly OYO scoped its first partner hotels before expanding.

  • OYO anchored on a precise hotel partner profile before defining what travelers would get
  • The supply side was the fragmented, harder to standardize side, and got defined first
  • Consistency for demand came from narrow, disciplined supply selection, not marketing

The question it answers

  1. How do I define an ideal customer for a two-sided marketplace where I have to pick two of them?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. Market size is meaningless until you know exactly who you're for, and Lenny turns that into a concrete, repeatable ICP exercise... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) Lenny Rachitsky
  4. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  5. For a two-sided marketplace, the first real decision is which side to define and win first, and this essay makes the case... NFX Essay · Long read (about 25 minutes) 19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace James Currier
  6. This is the most concrete answer to which of your two customers to define first, built from interviews with 17 major... Lenny's Newsletter Article · Long read (about 20 minutes) How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business, Part 2: Cracking the Chicken-and-Egg Problem (Supply vs. Demand) Lenny Rachitsky
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