Idea
Pattern: a marketplace for reliable hourly event staff
Ryan Hoover describes Pattern, a marketplace for hourly workers that started in hospitality. The wedge: assembling reliable, qualified crews (bouncers, waitstaff, cooks) to show up at the right time for an event, an overlooked sector because tech ignores hourly warehousing, hospitality, and cleaning work.
“Basically what Pattern is, it's a marketplace for hourly workers. They started off initially with hospitality. And an example here is let's say you're doing an event and you need 2 bouncers, you need some waitstaff, you need a few cooks, you need all these people to assemble at this particular time that have the right skills and you need them to be reliable because you don't want one of the cooks not to show up on your event day.”
Steal thisBuild a vertical staffing marketplace for an overlooked hourly sector (hospitality, warehousing, cleaning) where reliability and qualification are the value prop.
Framework
Solve the hard side of the marketplace first
Ryan Hoover's marketplace rule: figure out which side is harder to acquire and solve that first. Focusing only on the easy side just delays failure. For freelance talent platforms, talent is usually the hard side, because once you have high-quality talent, the hiring demand follows.
“I tend to try to think about which is the harder side of the market and try to solve for that first. And so without giving information about like how Pattern accomplished it, they were able to find that balance and get both talent that seemed to be high enough quality and also demand at the same time. And then like balance that and scale that as they grew. But that's how we tend to think about it. 'Cause marketplace models, the risk of these is when people focus on the easy side of the market and ultimately you need both to work. But if you focus only on the easy side, you never get the hard side and you like delay the hard side in a sense, then you're almost like delaying failure is kind of how I see it.”
Steal thisIdentify the harder side of your marketplace and solve it first; chasing only the easy side just delays failure.