

The "ladies' night" strategy - jonathanjaeger
http://cdixon.org/2010/10/16/the-ladies-night-strategy/

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minouye
Another challenge is the risk of alienating one market is always present. To
use the eBay example, they've recently focused their efforts much more
squarely on buyers by introducing new "top-rated seller" criteria and a fairly
liberal Buyer Protection Program. Buyers have benefited greatly, often at the
expense of sellers. I imagine in the next couple of years, the balance will
have shifted back to appease the unhappy sellers.

To contrast, Amazon seems to have done a good job of growing out its base of
satisfied external sellers (no personal experience, just anectodal). Perhaps
aiding this is the fact that Amazon has an intimate understanding of how to
succeed as a seller (they get fulfillment, pain points in the purchasing
process, etc.). They worked to cultivate their main market (the buyers), while
actively operating in their future market (as a seller).

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snotrockets
Interesting anecdote - an Israeli judge recently ruled against a club that had
a "ladies' night", forcing it to charge equal price for female and male
patrons, as having a different price based sex is a discrimination prohibited
by law.

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IgorPartola
This also gets into a whole debate of gender issues. For example in matters of
HR, nobody is qualified to judge someone's gender. If this same logic was
extended to bartenders and bouncers then "ladies' nights" would not be able to
exist. Then again, in this case it seems that the state of the system is a
steady state: (heterosexual) men are happy that women are at bars, women are
happy to get cheap/free drinks and bar owners are happy to make money.

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jonathanjaeger
The classic problem of having a two-sided market with an interesting real-life
analogy of bar-hopping/clubbing. Interesting to see whether Red Beacon or
Thumbtack address this issue the best (or maybe the services market is big
enough for the both of them).

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xenophanes
> _If you are starting a company that targets a two-sided market you need to
> figure out which side is the hard side and then focus your efforts on
> marketing to that side._

But if you get a bunch of the easy side, that will attract the hard side. You
can do it either way.

Look at buyers and sellers. If you have tons of buyers, that will attract
sellers. And if you have tons of sellers but no buyers, that will attract
buyers.

~~~
cdixon
I think a lot of times the "hard" part is a prerequisite for the easy part.
Think of UGC sites - the hard part are contributors. Without contributors you
can't even begin to go after readers.

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sokoloff
Interesting post, but I'm not sure that Microsoft users/developers is a
particularly good example of a two-sided market.

What percentage of Windows users chose Windows "because there are so many
developers"? (I'm sure many developers develop for Windows because of the vast
number of users.)

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jdp23
in the corporate world, availability of IT apps on Windows is a huge barrier
to Linux and Mac penetration

also back in the 80s/90s app availability was a huge battleground for OSs, and
became a big advantage for windows over OS/2 etc.

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ojbyrne
Digg was like this (and presumably Reddit and HN are too) - a small few
contributed to the site comparable to the number of readers. So in the
beginning there were many mechanisms (leaderboards, profiles, friends) for
attracting contributions.

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jonathanjaeger
Correct. For content sites like Wikipedia or Digg, it's a small percentage of
the users creating an overwhelming majority of the content (probably more
extreme than the 80/20 rule). Adding social features and gaming mechanics is
one way to incentivize those that are going to be putting in the work.

~~~
IgorPartola
I wonder what the actual split is. What is the number of front page stories
contributed by the top X users on HN?

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onwardly
There's a rule similar to 80/20 which is 90-9-1. 90% are just observers, 9%
react/respond (think upvote), and 1% contribute. I wouldn't be surprised if
the HN/Reddit/etc. is close to this or some normalized and skewed version of
it.

~~~
TooSmugToFail
I don't think that it's that extreme.

The difference between Wikipedia and Reddit/HN is what I would venture calling
'contribution barrier.'

Think how hard is it to contribute to a Wikipedia article vs. Posting or
commenting on Reddit/HN. Let alone voting.

I'd imagine that most of the registered users have voted, and a majority have
commented. I don't imagine quite a lot of people have posted links.

If I'd have to guess a ratio of lurkers:voters:commenters:posters, I'd say
it's 40:30:25:5.

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code_duck
If you do this, be sure to adjust your strategy once you've attracted enough
of the 'hard side', or things can become unbalance.

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newyorker
Great article on two-sided markets!

Do you have more great suggested resources to read?

~~~
jonathanjaeger
I suggest reading other posts by Chris Dixon if you liked this one
(cdixon.org) or any of the posts by Mark Suster on BothSidesOfTheTable (here's
one that is somewhat related you might enjoy:
[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/10/04/3-sales-
tips-f...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/10/04/3-sales-tips-for-
startups-creating-a-burning-platform/)).

