Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are we talking about a marketplace model? What is the business model?

Ryan Farley: It’s a transactional model. We process all the payments and we pay the service providers. It makes it a lot easier for them. The lawn service providers are going to make more money through our platform and it allows them to move their own customers to our platform because we take care of so much of the administrative overhead. >>>

Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 1)

As you know from our prior coverage, we like niche two-sided marketplaces a lot. Here’s another one to study. Please note, this company went through TechStars, and had a validated business before getting into TechStars, as we have seen in several other case studies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Ryan Farley: I grew up in Washington DC metro area. I went to school at Virginia Tech for Mechanical Engineering. I >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money?

Anthony Smith: CRM, as you well know, is a very popular field with a lot of competition. Insightly was just one of many CRMs that had popped up over the four years prior to my starting the business. We had a lot of traction with small business customers around the world. We also worked hard to make sure that they were having a good experience on the platform and encouraging them to leave reviews in the Microsoft marketplace or the Google marketplace and incentivize telling their friends.

As a freemium product, that helped us gain some early traction over some of the paid-only options in the market. I did feel that >>>

10 Tech Entrepreneurs Who Did NOT Move to Silicon Valley in Podcasts

Let’s say you want to build a great tech company. Should you start by moving to Silicon Valley? Or, can you do it from right where you are, right from your own hometown?

I suggest start validating your startup idea and building from right where you are. Today, it is no longer necessary for ambitious entrepreneurs to be in Silicon Valley. Great tech companies, even billion dollar Unicorns, can be built from anywhere. Listen to the following 30-minute podcast interviews with some successful tech entrepreneurs who have done just that.

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From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying users?

Anthony Smith: We talked through it and looked at what would be some good options there. Google had set a benchmark offering of $4.95 per user per month for an incredible amount of value. We felt we couldn’t go too much above that. We started off around about $12.95 per user per month.

When we started offering that to customers, we offered a higher level of support but not necessarily more features. At that point in >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, were you charging for the product?

Anthony Smith: We were not. Anybody could install Insightly and start using it. I was still at Perth in Western Australia. A lot of Google’s customers were based in the US which is a 12-hour time difference. A lot of stuff was happening in the middle of the night for me. My email system was blowing up. There were a lot of people inquiring about it, submitting bugs, and needing technical support and help. I was doing a lot of work from 9PM through to 6AM.

Sramana Mitra: How many downloads did you get and how many of these were active users? >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to go very cheap and with no administration kind of model.

Anthony Smith: Right. These small businesses don’t have a lot of resources. More to the point is that employees within those companies don’t sit in front of the computer all day. They go off and do their own thing during the day. Some of them might use a computer for half an hour after they finish the shift or after they’ve finished with a customer. They’re not sitting in front a computer all day and using this software as part of the job. It’s more of an add-on piece that helps them orchestrate some of their activities. >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you did your own company, but you built software for a particular large mining company. You were doing contract software services at a contracting company?

Anthony Smith: I did professional consulting for a couple of years and then teamed up with another consultant. We built some software for a large mining company. I spent about 18 months there and built that out. We got to the point where the mining company was really happy with it and started rolling it out.

In the history of computing, there have been about three really big >>>