Can Etsy Scale?

58 points by mchafkin 15 years ago | 32 comments

slapshot 15 years ago |

Etsy 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, Amazon, etc) then it would be greatly improved. It's a much harder problem to sovle than Netflix and Amazon because many items are one-of-a-kind (nobody else bought exactly what you bought), but comparisons of trends across sellers, across keywords, and across image features might work.

Etsy has an experimental "pick the object you like most" feature that leads to some results, but it doesn't allow narrow enough focusing yet: http://tastetest.etsy.com/

Same for the "explorer" view: http://www.etsy.com/explorer

callmeed 15 years ago | |

Maybe its not a UI problem ... maybe it's a gatekeeping problem.

This might sound harsh, but what I tend to see is a lot of beginner or wannabe crafters selling the only thing they can make: generic knit beanies or a cheap bag with some felt shapes cut out and glued on.

For every truly artistic, quirky item or piece of jewelry created by a skilled artisan there are ~20 simple, cheap things that (I'm guessing) almost no one buys.

Why does Etsy have to let everyone and anyone in? Is it wrong to consider some type of approval process or "hey we noticed you haven't sold anything in 6 months" filter?

Edit: to add to that, one area I think Etsy should increase their focus on is in fine art (photography, paintings, prints). Sites like 20x200 are doing well and I think it would be good for Etsy to have an area of their site dedicated to getting good, curated art on the walls of people's homes.

cowpewter 15 years ago | |

Yeah, their "You might like" on the front page is pretty terrible. It seems to just pick random items from shops you've favorited/favorited an item in - to the point where it quite frequently recommends me items I've already marked as a favorite!

I already know I like that item. That's why I favorited it. I want to see things I didn't already know existed.

CoreyLoose 15 years ago | |

I've taken a shot at this very problem - curious what you think about it. http://brainsy.net

yesimahuman 15 years ago | | |

Was just about to post this. Great work!

leftnode 15 years ago |

Can 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.

tmountain 15 years ago | |

There's a fantastic hamburger place down the street from my house. They make a fixed number of patties every day and when they run out, they close for the day. The owners are constantly asked why they don't buy more patties or expand to more locations around town. They've repeatedly stated that they're doing just fine with where they are and have no desire to push things further. There's a certain beauty here that's hard to quantify.

leftnode 15 years ago | | |

That is an awesome way to run a company. Of course, the nice thing about a software company online is there's never any closing time, but it would be nice to see a software company for once say, "this is big enough, I think we're good here."

Unless, of course, you start to earn a bad reputation for slow support times or bad customer service because your product is so popular, but I guess that is a good problem to have.

Thanks for sharing.

slapshot 15 years ago | |

That is one definition of a "lifestyle business" -- usually a boostrapped small company that reaches a peak that balances the founder's financial interests with his/her interest in free time.

Unfortunately, once you've taken VC money it's very hard to justify not scaling. They are looking for home runs, not bunt singles. If the company stops scaling because the founder doesn't want to scale any more, the founder will be quickly replaced as CEO. If the company stops scaling because the market is saturated, then some very hard conversations will follow.

tomkarlo 15 years ago | |

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.

hartror 15 years ago | |

Sure, but you will have to either self fund or find investors that share your vision. A lot of family businesses work like that, they grow to the extent they need to to support the family and then stop once they have reach a level of desired comfort.

hellweaver666 15 years ago | |

There are lots of business that do exactly that. Give Small Giants a read, it's really quite interesting.

http://www.smallgiantsbook.com/

leftnode 15 years ago | | |

Thank you for that, I'll give it a look.

spot 15 years ago |

I learned last week that one of the founders of Etsy is Jared Tarbell, the excellent computational artist (http://complexification.net/gallery/, http://www.levitated.net/). He wasn't mentioned in the article though, I wonder why.

mcfunley 15 years ago | |

Jared is here at Etsy right now. So, for no nefarious reasons that I can think of.

tomkarlo 15 years ago |

The best part of this article may be the reference to Regretsy. http://www.regretsy.com/

mikecarlucci 15 years ago | |

I haven't laughed so hard in months. The clay portraits and taxidermy rat simply amazing.

That said, I bought a poster on etsy of the 500 most common passwords, it's not all creepy.

stevenj 15 years ago |

Printer-friendly version: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin-scale-ets...

jswinghammer 15 years ago |

I 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.

mduvall 15 years ago |

Etsy really has the potential to become a major player in the micro-vendor market if it can take design considerations seriously - it may be at the vanguard of the industry at the moment but without actual design consideration for the future may be exactly the problem. I sometimes frequent the site and get the craigslist-this-will-probably-stay-the-same-forever feeling.

pdaviesa 15 years ago |

I love etsy but this article brings up many good points. I wonder if etsy needs to look at related but new businesses in order to truly scale. Perhaps they need to look more at the physical side of their business, e.g. running custom manufacturing for their clients, supply chain mgmt for their more successful clients who have outgrown the etsy marketplace, etc.

knieveltech 15 years ago |

Wait, 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.

tomkarlo 15 years ago | |

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."

knieveltech 15 years ago | | |

I'm not so sure about that. Istockphoto's model for keeping crap out of their stock photo offerings seems to work pretty solidly, and at minimum some form of curation would scrape off the resellers and the kind of crap that's so popular over on regretsy.

wmeredith 15 years ago |

Ughhh, after the second pop-over ad I quit reading.

Dramatize 15 years ago | |

The second one didn't even have a close link.

mjh8136 15 years ago | | |

Sorry about the popovers!

shizcakes 15 years ago |

Etsy 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...

harryh 15 years ago | |

Did you even read the post? It's about scaling the business not scaling the technology.

shizcakes 15 years ago | | |

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.

bifrost 15 years ago |

As someone who's spent time scaling sites, the problem isn't going to be if they can scale, its going to be will the management make it happen. Developers rarely do it right, and they'll need good management and oversight to pull it off. The ETSY devs I've met were pretty sharp, so I get the feeling they'll do better than most, but everyone needs a shove in the right direction.