Sublime

Under Vijaye’s leadership, the coding and launching of our V1 product to several U.S. cities took about two months.

Almost every two-sided marketplace struggles with bringing on enough supply and/or bringing on enough demand. Surprisingly, Facebook didn’t. We already had both buyers and sellers, but we weren’t succeeding in making the connection between the two. As long as we stayed within Groups, we could not address this issue.

Some of our earliest experiments were simply structuring the groups so that items for sale showed up as listings rather than just discussion posts.

—Tina Jiang, Product Manager at Faire

Once we had the tab within the Facebook app to drive buyer engagement, we settled on the key metric of weekly buyer retention. Our early bet was that supply would drive demand—that having sufficient inventory would get buyers excited about coming to this new tab to browse. To do that, we had to get sellers on board. Sellers had no incentive to crea... See more

Last year they were serving 50,000 customers / day through their platform and did approximately $500 million in GMV (the value of the orders placed), this year they are on track to do $3 billion (with a B) and expect to end the year at a revenue run rate that may top $100 million (yes, I asked for permission to publish these numbers).

5. Group purchasing