If you have yet to hear about couchsurfing.com, it is a platform that lets people travel and crash on each other's couches for free. Anyone can sign up, create a profile, meet locals, and stay with them. Seems pretty cool right? I thought so.
Personally, I have never been one to have a stranger on my couch - but I have always admired people who were that cool. Continuing on my quest to learn about double-sided marketplaces, Casey Fenton began to tell me about how he got started. (Important to note he is no longer with the company)
Casey knew the importance of creating a different environment online, so he built the platform and decided to post a message on a few of the burning man community boards. "Hey, I created this cool thing, maybe you want to check it out." That's it! From this, he grabbed about 100 profiles, with people answering prompted questions like "what is your philosophy on life" or "where do you want to travel next." Overall he curated a pretty unique platform, which immediately got the controversial media coverage it deserved in 2004. With the free media coverage, the platform took off.
Fast forward to 2020, here is what he learned:
1) You need to be able to control supply and demand. At the time, he didn't realize how important creating the balance of supply and demand was on the platform, For couchsurfing.com, that translated into how many times you had to request to stay at someone's place before they agreed.
2) You need to control the experience. Creating a platform that's success depends on third parties is not an easy feat, although Uber has figured out how to do this. If someone received a bad review, that automatically sparked a retaliation bad review - and the downward spiral began. Eventually, reviews were not shown until both parties had submitted a review... problem solved.
3) Focus on your CORE deliverables. More important than adding new features is making sure that you are meeting the core needs of the market.
4) Keep it lean. At one point, couchsurfing.com spent 3M on an algorithm to create a better user experience, only to learn that what they were doing before worked better.
5) Feedback Loop. Figure out what your 1 or 3 things are that would make the company successful, and create a feedback loop to keep improving those.
Wondering what Casey is doing today? He started another disrupter company - but this time its with improvements on employee engagement and the value of RSU's over stock options. Check it out here: www.upstock.io
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