How I run a bootstrapped marketplace with 11 sites and 5,000 vendors – by myself | Hacker News Reader

How I run a bootstrapped marketplace with 11 sites and 5,000 vendors – by myself

limedaring.com

32 pointslimedaring8 comments

Hey limedaring, this post is great with lots of information. I bought your book in KS and you have all my admiration as an entrepreneur. Marketplaces are really hard to start for the egg-chicken problem, I know this first hand, and it's difficult to stay motivated as a founder.

Thanks!

Happy to answer any questions anyone has about bootstrapping, running a marketplace, trying and failing to raise money, etc.!

Your wedding site has been featured on here before as well, hasn't it?

Yeah — not in awhile though! About four years ago I wrote a few articles about looking for a cofounder and then about learning how to code and launching the site myself that got popular here. Good memory.

I wasn't complaining, btw :-) I think it's great how well your site has done and the article was very interesting.

Would love to learn about those very early stages in cold emailing. Do you find this can work for any business vertical - I want to cold email places vs cold calling them since it's so much faster, but I fear that the owners may not use or check their emails that much. Any recommendations on scaling this quickly? What was your success rate of emails that lead to replies or sign ups?

I'm lucky in that wedding vendors primarily work online, so they're always on email. Other businesses in other verticals, probably not. This vertical was a good fit for me because I would do anything to avoid making a phone call (too introverted for that.)

I honestly don't remember my success rate as it's been a long while, but I want to say it was at least 25%. Keep in mind I was pitching a free product that vendors are already used to (there are TONS of wedding vendor directories.)

As for scaling, no idea. Some CRMs allow you to mass-send email but I worry about those - feels scummy, though maybe I should just get over that feeling and try it out.

Good luck!

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