The best part of this article may be the reference to Regretsy.
http://www.regretsy.com/
Can Etsy Scale?
11–20 of 35 posts
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#12Wait, 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.
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."
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#13Can 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.
If you've raised $50M from VCs, who probably expect you to be worth $1bn (so that their stake can be worth $500M or more) you don't really have a choice. Unfortunately, as a company doing 40M in revenue, that probably means they have to grow at least 10x-15x.
The non-financial issue is that if you hire great people and want to keep them, you usually need growth so that their responsibility and comp keep growing. Otherwise, they're going to have to grow by moving on to other companies with jobs that offer more responsibility / opportunity.
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#14Ughhh, after the second pop-over ad I quit reading.
The second one didn't even have a close link.
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#15Etsy 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...
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#16Etsy 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...
Did you even read the post? It's about scaling the business not scaling the technology.
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#17Etsy 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...
Did you even read the post? It's about scaling the business not scaling the technology.
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.
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#18I 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.
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you even read the post? It's about scaling the business not scaling the technology.
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.
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...?
Re: Can Etsy Scale?
#20Etsy 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,…
I've taken a shot at this very problem - curious what you think about it. http://brainsy.net