2 builders who never spoke to each other

Recruit the rival you cannot beat

Sort the competitive field into who you must avoid, who you can out-design and who is better treated as a partner than an enemy. Owning one narrow step of the workflow gives you traffic to trade, and matching the economics a supplier already earns elsewhere makes listing with you free money for them.

The method

1. 01

   Pitch suppliers by matching the per-sale economics they already get elsewhere so listing with you is free money, and offer them a cut for sending their own buyers to you.

2. 02

   Solve one narrow step of a workflow extremely well and let that make you the place people go for that step; the traffic that follows becomes the asset you can offer partners.

3. 03

   Sort the competitive landscape into who you cannot fight, who you can beat on design and usability, and who you should recruit as a partner instead of treating as a rival.

4. 04

   Bootstrap a marketplace by dropshipping your own goods first, and only recruit third party sellers once the traffic exists to make it worth their while.

What it returned

• Zue's pitch to Etsy designers was the same per-sale revenue with no extra work, plus a kickback for referring template buyers to his site to fill them in, which would also stock his site with designs for free.

• Zue's stated value add was letting someone drop their guest list into an existing layout in seconds, which he expected to turn his site into a marketplace and a distribution channel for designers.

• Zue put big print shops like Minted and Michael's in the avoid column, near-identical niche sites like seatingcard.com in the beatable column, and the printable designers on Etsy in the partner column.

• Howell Market ran a Shopify dropshipping store of novelty gift items to build traffic. One seller, based in Ireland, signed up to list unusual suits and a few sold.

Sources

• The Place Card PitchCory Zue · coryzue.com · There are great partnership opportunities · 2017-04-26
• Howell Market: How Bad Partners Killed an e-CommerceCody Howell · failory.com · How did you build it? Which was your business model? · undated