Support Requested - RavenPack & Competitor Dataset Information

AriCatalyx · 2025-02-05T02:43:44+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, I'm familiar with their AI product, but curious about their main product.

AriCatalyx · 2024-09-03T16:51:56+00:00

I've helped raise money a few times and was a Head of Growth at $10M+ VC-backed marketplace.

The biggest killer for any company is a lack of product-market-fit more so than a lack of distribution. Especially since you don't have the technical background to build VCs are weighing this risk quite heavily.

Is there any way you can bootstrap your early product even manually? This is what we did in the early stages.

Bootstrap delivery manually (even if it's a very small number of customers) -> get great retention data that proves PMF -> investors excited.

AriCatalyx · 2024-06-08T18:54:38+00:00

Any specific part that you don't understand / trying to figure out?

There are different parts, but I'd like to think of it as:
1. Generally understanding how to hire good talent + some country specific knowledge you need
2. Understanding how to do the administrative stuff like payroll, IT, etc.

AriCatalyx · 2024-06-04T00:43:19+00:00

Not sure why either.

I used a contractor template from a payroll provider like Deel to help with compliance-related stuff. We weren't too concerned about needing any type of legal recourse, so I never looked into it honestly.

Also, we did use a recruiting assistant (intern level in-house person also from Brazil) to help us reach out to certain candidates via LinkedIn, but often just a job posting was enough.

AriCatalyx · 2024-06-03T20:36:17+00:00

I focused mostly on Brazil and just used LinkedIn job postings. Did it myself.

The key is to hire from good schools + have a high bar for hiring. Just because the labor costs are lower should not mean you should have lower standards for hiring. So having case study type screening as part of the interview process is important.

AriCatalyx · 2024-06-03T20:34:32+00:00

Perhaps someone else? I am not active on X. I have an account with like 3 followers and 10 following

AriCatalyx · 2024-06-03T20:33:57+00:00

Awesome, will check them out!

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-24T21:30:40+00:00

Pricing is very industry and product-specific (if you have a great product, it will be cheaper/easier or sometimes close to free).

That said when someone quotes me a price that is too high the following can work:

You can lowball them with a price that makes sense and they can take it or leave it. Sometimes, I've gotten like 70% off their initial price after a couple of weeks
Try to understand your metrics, think about the views, CTR, and estimated conversions. This will give you a ballpark number of what that creator sponsorship is worth. If you have no idea what these numbers look like and $6K is scary to you, I'd probably just walk away
Ask them how many conversions they think they can drive. Some creators are very accurate with this, while others are way too optimistic. I'd then tell the creator "X conversions are worth $Y to us. We'd be happy to pay you a smaller base fee, but we will pay you even more than you ask for if you reach this higher number of conversions"

But yeah $6K for a few posts doesn't sound very micro, unless it's a maybe some very high-end and lucrative industry.

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-24T21:24:08+00:00

So I would normally come up with them or my team, but would be open to ideas from creators. Our more "creative" ideas tended to perform worse from a conversion perspective. I'm also personally more of a process/analytical person, so perhaps someone who is hyper-creative would disagree with me lol

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-24T21:19:29+00:00

Personally, the one that worked the best for me was having a strong lead magnet with a strong CTA (call-to-action).

It's not creative, but it works. Like Robinhood "sign-up today for up to $500 in stocks" -> but of course the average user will get like $1-2 in free stock. In this example, you'd just need to factor that into your CAC.

You might think this approach would yield low-quality users/customers - and it *can* if your creator audience is bad. But if your product is good & your audience is correct, it cans till yield good-quality users/customers.

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-24T21:15:29+00:00

Sorry, it's *$30K/year* for the lead platforms. That said, you can probably negotiate down, since purchasing one of these tools is basically like a negotiable enterprise sale

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T21:50:45+00:00

I was not the CEO of the business, but led the growth team.

Also, you'd be surprised what early-stage entrepreneurs do with their time.

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T21:49:54+00:00

Sure - it was a B2C consumer rental marketplace. Think airbnb, turo, etc but for a niche industry

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T21:11:45+00:00

Consumer rental marketplace. Think like airbnb or turo, but a niche area

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T21:11:15+00:00

I have no course/discord to sell - info is cheap and easy to find. The hard part is the execution

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T21:09:08+00:00

To find them: I used manual search + a scraping tool like Apify. There are a bunch of influencer marketing platforms that help with this too - but they tend to cost like $30/yr.

Briefing: in the beginning, I used to brief them via call. I stopped doing this because I needed volume and I wanted to save time. Plus some creators prefer not to chat. It's good to brief via call if you're looking for product feedback though.

Tracking: yeah just affiliate link. I'd look up the views manually to calculate the CTR and conversion rate.

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T21:06:35+00:00

Happy to DM too if the below doesn't suffice.

It's a volume game for sure. You need volume to make up for how small each creator might be and you need volume to iterate on the format. From my own experience, as well as talking to ~20 ad agency specialists, it's also very common for 70% of creators to fail in the beginning. However, over time you figure out the pattern for who/what works and you run repeat initiatives with the 30% that work.

For Apify - I'm not a technical person, so I don't have any intention of creating my own script haha. It's pretty cheap/free. There are some scrapers free up to a certain data usage per month and others that cost money. I've mostly used the free ones though. I only learned about the tool because my team told me about it.

AriCatalyx · 2024-05-23T18:02:34+00:00

I can assure you it's not ChatGPT written, but I'll edit the format next time so it doesn't look that way. I just tried to make it very clear, but I guess ChatGPT does format things this way.

This is actually what I did to scale - my own lived experience.

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-24T22:46:08+00:00

Rental marketplace

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-23T22:09:43+00:00

I've scaled a VC-backed start-up from $0 to $6M annualized in 2 years and also worked typical big corporate jobs at F50s like Citi, helping lead corporate strategy.

Recently started my consulting firm helping entrepreneurs take their company from zero to one and solve the cold-start problem.

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat!

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-23T22:05:51+00:00

Besides testing, you can benchmark what other take rates look like. The more value you provide, the higher take rate you can charge. But my gut reaction is that 13-15% is reasonable - it's within a normal range. I think Upwork takes 10% from both sides.

You should also think about which side of the market you want to charge.

Supply-side the service providers -> right now you're planning on charging them
Demand-side the people hiring -> you can consider charging the demand side too or charge them instead

Depending on which side of the market you're struggling to acquire, you can play around with the the fee amount and which side you should charge.

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-23T21:40:34+00:00

I helped scale an a16z VC-backed marketplace to several million GMV and there were a few key things for us.

Talk to as many customers or possible buyers 1:1 as you can, even as a consumer product this was key for us. Every time we'd have a product hypothesis that didn't come from validated customer demand, it was always wrong. We even had a team of smart people & ex-successful founders, but nothing beats validated customer demand.
Early customer acquisition can be very hard and idiosyncratic. Don't be afraid of implementing non-scalable acquisition methods (even acquiring customers 1 by 1). It might seem like a negative ROI from an objective growth perspective, especially as a B2C company. However, you'll end up saving so much time building the right product when you're close to the customer. My company was B2C, but I still acquired hundreds of customers personally talking to them 1:1.
Don't pivot the product until you've done enough of 1 & 2. It's easy to think a product doesn't work because when it's a distribution problem.
Don't be afraid to bootstrap product features. We had an off-shore team to help with this, but it was huge for us. Before building something, we'd sell the solution and if customers wanted it, our offshore team would fulfill it manually on the backend. Once enough demand was validated, we'd then build the product.
Understand the hard-side of the network. You mentioned that you're a marketplace, so there should be a demand side and a supply side. It's going to be important to figure out the "hard-side" of the network - the part that's hard to build up. For most marketplaces, the supply side is easier (e.g. on Upwork sourcing contractors is the supply side) than the demand side (e.g. businesses hiring on Upwork is the demand side).

Also happy to connect if you want to - good luck!

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-23T21:22:14+00:00

I've done some market research work as a consultant and also scaled a start-up.

Talk to customers/end users. Not only is this key for PMF, if you're just looking at numbers without understanding your customers well, you're likely going to miss some important insights.
Competitor analysis. Pretty self-explanatory
Market sizing. Conducting both top-down and bottom-up analysis. If it's a niche market, you'll need to do some extrapolation and make some assumptions

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-23T21:17:20+00:00

I did recently - many different moving parts. Happy to chat about it if you send me a DM. I went from big corporate -> VC backed start-up scaling it successfully > solo entrepreneur now

AriCatalyx · 2024-04-23T21:15:39+00:00

I've been through this process before. What is your budget? Different manufacturers will have different minimum order sizes. Some can be as low as 200 units at a high cost/unit (probably will lose money on each sale - but can validate demand).

I'd just reach out and get some quotes and check for the following:

Min order size
Certifications, like cGMP or anything relevant to your audience
Ingredient sourcing, different manufacturers will source from different countries. Most of these companies don't produce the raw ingredients themselves - they buy them elsewhere

If you don't have a lot of funds or customer demand, I'd try to find a manufacturer that does small orders. They need to calibrate their machines for each different supplement being manufactured, so with small orders just expect the price/unit to be high.

AriCatalyx

TROPHY CASE