

Can Etsy Scale? - mchafkin
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin-scale-etsy.html

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slapshot
Etsy has a huge UI challenge right now: as the volume of listings increase, it
becomes harder to find things that I'm interested in. Even text search is
quickly overwhelming, because it's hard to describe new and quirky objects
that are Etsy's biggest draw (for me).

If Etsy could create a good "we see you've bought quirky post-industrial
greeting cards, maybe you'd be interested in ____" function (much like
Netflix, Amazon, etc) then it would be greatly improved. It's a much harder
problem to sovle than Netflix and Amazon because many items are one-of-a-kind
(nobody else bought exactly what you bought), but comparisons of trends across
sellers, across keywords, and across image features might work.

Etsy has an experimental "pick the object you like most" feature that leads to
some results, but it doesn't allow narrow enough focusing yet:
<http://tastetest.etsy.com/>

Same for the "explorer" view: <http://www.etsy.com/explorer>

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CoreyLoose
I've taken a shot at this very problem - curious what you think about it.
<http://brainsy.net>

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yesimahuman
Was just about to post this. Great work!

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leftnode
Can a business ever just reach a natural size and say to themselves, "this is
as large as we're going to get, we're profitable, having a good time, and
everyone is happy."

I realize they have funding and thus a responsibility to maximize their
investments, but I'd love to build a company that feels like it has a natural
size.

~~~
tmountain
There's a fantastic hamburger place down the street from my house. They make a
fixed number of patties every day and when they run out, they close for the
day. The owners are constantly asked why they don't buy more patties or expand
to more locations around town. They've repeatedly stated that they're doing
just fine with where they are and have no desire to push things further.
There's a certain beauty here that's hard to quantify.

~~~
leftnode
That is an awesome way to run a company. Of course, the nice thing about a
software company online is there's never any closing time, but it would be
nice to see a software company for once say, "this is big enough, I think
we're good here."

Unless, of course, you start to earn a bad reputation for slow support times
or bad customer service because your product is so popular, but I guess that
is a good problem to have.

Thanks for sharing.

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spot
I learned last week that one of the founders of Etsy is Jared Tarbell, the
excellent computational artist (<http://complexification.net/gallery/>,
<http://www.levitated.net/>). He wasn't mentioned in the article though, I
wonder why.

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mcfunley
Jared is here at Etsy right now. So, for no nefarious reasons that I can think
of.

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tomkarlo
The best part of this article may be the reference to Regretsy.
<http://www.regretsy.com/>

~~~
mikecarlucci
I haven't laughed so hard in months. The clay portraits and taxidermy rat
simply amazing.

That said, I bought a poster on etsy of the 500 most common passwords, it's
not all creepy.

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stevenj
Printer-friendly version: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin-
scale-ets...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin-scale-
etsy_Printer_Friendly.html)

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jswinghammer
I guess the answer is maybe. One person non-software businesses run into all
kinds of scaling problems that sellers ran into trying the quit your day job
thing. I'm not sure the quit your day job is the right approach for most
sellers. After reading the book E-Myth I realized that every Etsy seller
should read it immediately if only to realize that they'd be better off doing
something else. It seems like it's a good way to make some extra money if you
make something nice. There's nothing wrong with that approach but it's less
exciting than quiting your job to make cool things to sell on the internet.
The people I've met who sell their crafts on Etsy typically have no money to
do anything fun and no time to do it anyway.

I think the basic problem is that by taking all that money the expectations
are far different. If they had bootstrapped then they'd be looking at a great
business that could grow organically without the pressure to big a billion
dollar business. It seems like (to put it in Joel Spolsky's framework) they
are a Ben & Jerry's business playing with an Amazon model.

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mduvall
Etsy really has the potential to become a major player in the micro-vendor
market if it can take design considerations seriously - it may be at the
vanguard of the industry at the moment but without actual design consideration
for the future may be exactly the problem. I sometimes frequent the site and
get the craigslist-this-will-probably-stay-the-same-forever feeling.

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pdaviesa
I love etsy but this article brings up many good points. I wonder if etsy
needs to look at related but new businesses in order to truly scale. Perhaps
they need to look more at the physical side of their business, e.g. running
custom manufacturing for their clients, supply chain mgmt for their more
successful clients who have outgrown the etsy marketplace, etc.

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knieveltech
Wait, what? Why the hell would anyone WANT Etsy to scale? Their brand is
synonymous with the worst sort of tasteless kitsch known to man. What really
needs to happen is someone needs to reboot the concept but include
istockphoto.com's vetting process for potential vendors.

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tomkarlo
One man's treasure is another man's knitted kitten bowtie. It's difficult to
do a "curated" etsy when their core offering is basically "things not
mainstream enough to be mass produced."

~~~
knieveltech
I'm not so sure about that. Istockphoto's model for keeping crap out of their
stock photo offerings seems to work pretty solidly, and at minimum some form
of curation would scrape off the resellers and the kind of crap that's so
popular over on regretsy.

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wmeredith
Ughhh, after the second pop-over ad I quit reading.

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Dramatize
The second one didn't even have a close link.

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mjh8136
Sorry about the popovers!

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shizcakes
Etsy has John Allspaw, the guy who scaled Flickr. The man breathes scaling. He
wrote the book on it! I realize he's an ops guy, but when you've got someone
like him working for you, I'd say you've got a good chance of success.

[http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/john-allspaw-joins-
the...](http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/john-allspaw-joins-the-etsy-
team-6183/)

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harryh
Did you even read the post? It's about scaling the business not scaling the
technology.

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shizcakes
Yes. My point isn't that Allspaw can add servers and whatnot, but that he's a
VP at the company. At some point, you stop thinking about computers and start
thinking about how the business grows, and I think that he can help in that
regard.

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earl
The article's thesis seems to be that you can't actually -- or it's very
difficult -- to run a successful business on etsy, particularly given etsy's
requirement that everything be handmade. This in turn is bad for etsy, since
sellers will eventually give up once they realize how little they're earning.
I'm at a complete loss to see how your comments have anything to do with the
article...?

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bifrost
As someone who's spent time scaling sites, the problem isn't going to be if
they can scale, its going to be will the management make it happen. Developers
rarely do it right, and they'll need good management and oversight to pull it
off. The ETSY devs I've met were pretty sharp, so I get the feeling they'll do
better than most, but everyone needs a shove in the right direction.

