Podcast

Untold Seed Stories: The First 500 Days of Urban Company

Abhiraj Bhal, hosted by Abhinav Chaturvedi · SeedToScale Free Intermediate India

This traces Urban Company's earliest days recruiting and defining their first service professionals in one city before expanding categories or geographies, a direct Indian example of starting narrow enough that supply and demand can actually find each other. It shows the messy, manual early process of figuring out exactly which professionals to onboard first, a good listen if your marketplace involves any kind of service professional as supply.

  • Urban Company started with a narrow set of service categories in one city before expanding
  • Early supply selection was manual and specific, not automated or broad
  • Expansion followed only after the first narrow match was working reliably

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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