Building a community and reaching critical mass on a P2P marketplace requires a lot of passion, patience and local involvement. Humanizing your platform brings users closer to you, this is the key message of this amazing panel at OuiShareFest. We all agree that community building and critical mass are crucial for P2P marketplaces. While we all agree that communities should even become a central element of the whole strategy of two-sided marketplaces, this still remains challenging. How to get it started? As Clement Marcelet Head of Community for France at Airbnb admitted, it took a year to Airbnb to get the first 100 users. And the bad news is, there is no magic wand. After all, every community is unique, built on a group of individuals sharing the same interests, applying some common strategies could help overcome the difficulties with launching a P2P marketplace. Here are key takeaways from the OuiShareFest panel featuring leading players of the collaborative economy scene: Airbnb, Gidsy, Videdressing and Sharetribe.
Pull demand with pre-registered offers
Critical mass is a key element for two-sided marketplaces. But how to start building it? There is nothing worse than starting in user acquisition than letting your users lend on an inactive platform lacking products, services and potential trading partners, explained Juho Makkonen, co-founder of Sharetribe. To avoid this, you have to work hard on community building -- even before launching your website. As a P2P marketplace founder, you should ask yourself: which group of people are on the supply side? Who is providing the products, services or his time? The answer may be easy in the case of platforms selling or renting products, but might get trickier when dealing with services or bartering. By focusing on the acquisition of existing communities, you could probably save a lot of time and energy. Plus, you could benefit from the world-of-mouth effect once the idea takes ground in an opinion-leader community. Videdressing for instance decided to partner with fashion bloggers who would spread the word about the contests they were launching. Once the first early adopters on the supply side are joining you, they can start creating a catalogue of products or services which step-by-step start building demand. This strategy enabled them to build an initial catalogue of 5,000 products, claims Vidresssing's Founder Meryl Job.
Rely on your community
Just as it is true from a lean startup perspective, listening to your community and acting accordingly is just the right way to move forward. Relying on your strategic ambassadors, those who participate on both sides of the marketplace, must be the jackpot. Do not think that you know it better on your own, get all the feedbacks that you can, focusing on both sides of the market since the two do not have the same needs and interests. When it gets to decision about geographical expansion, do not hesitate to take tips from your users. The touring online marketplace Gidsy introduced a community-driven initiative called ‘Unlock your city’ enabling users to start a new hotspot with only 3 friends and 5 activities in the selected city. According to Katie Needs, this is how Gidsy spread in cities like Paris, Istanbul, Cape Town before opening the services all around the world (before the startup was bought by GetYourGuide). A strategy which is also very common at Taskrabbit: the team asks people around the world to vote on the cities where they want the jobbing marketplace to start operating. This is how London is becoming the first spot in Europe for the leading jobbing platform.
Humanize your platform and go offline
AirBnb's Clément Marcelet unveiled that 60% of the leading P2P accommodation marketplace growth is driven from word-of-mouth. In order to sustain and build on this effect, Airbnb puts a focus on local communities creating local offices and organizing meetings offline with members of the community. Even global marketplaces were launched on a local scale before started spreading from a city to another. Managing these local communities one-by-one means dedicating people to them offline. Offline meetups are very powerful tools to connect with the community. This online-offline interaction is crucial to receive valuable feedbacks, get to know users’ needs and learn about what is going on in the community. “You always have a wow effect because for a lot of people it is still unbelievable to meet a website,” Clément Marcelet explained. He adds:
“It’s a good way to remind the community that a website is not just about engineers and servers”
Another way to humanize the experience of your platform is to consider users as partners in content creation. "Stories are a valuable social currency," Katie Needs from Gidsy emphasizes. “There is always a story behind the person that is using your product and sharing that is a really good way to get the people connected.” All in all, we had the chance to listen to a very inspiring panel discussion with experienced professionals about the topic building communities and critical mass on P2P marketplaces. Please share your thoughts, your own tips and experience and bring forward this event in an online discussion. And first, watch this insightful panel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PImS2VAq_TE Picture Credit: