Nick Huzar
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nick Huzar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, OfferUp's the largest local marketplace in the United States, and we really want to be the best at buying and selling things locally. Not just buying and selling. Actually, we're branching out big time this year. We're launching services and jobs and rentals, and we even have local news now. So we really want to be everything local is kind of how I would think about OfferUp.
Can you talk about that growth journey? Sure. Well, I, I'd say in the early days, you know, everyone has the idea. Uh, and then it's, then the hard part is how you execute, how do you build it? Um, you know, we started writing code for offer up before there were Android phones. That gives you an idea of where we were. Um, And it was a hard time.
A lot of times building companies, they say it's about timing. I think we were pretty early. We saw this phone. We had this idea that, hey, we're all going to have these phones. We can just take pictures and we can communicate with these devices. But there's a lot of skepticism. A lot of people thinking, you name it, I've heard it. I've heard people say that no one's going to buy from their phone.
How do you disrupt Craigslist? You know, no one's been able to do this. And so I think, you know, for better or worse, I think good entrepreneurs just have an idea and they can't get it out of their head. And that was definitely me. I was stubborn and I just said, that's it. We're going to go build this. But it was really tough in the early days trying to get scale, trying to get users to use it.
So that was, I'd say, a two year journey of, hey, there's an app. Why isn't everybody using it? And so you just have to run a lot of experiments and understand what works, what doesn't work. But that was, you know, pretty much I'd sum up the first two years was just lots of failed experiments. And then ultimately some that worked and we just kept doubling down on those two to grow.
Yeah, I'd say, you know, knowing your customers and knowing what matters. So in the world of a marketplace, when you post something, somebody better buy it. Because if somebody doesn't buy it, then what good is your marketplace? So we got really good in the beginning. I think sometimes people try to scale too big. In fact, there was a number of other competitors to offer up when we launched.
They raised a lot more money than we did. And I told the team, don't worry, they're going to go out of business. Like, what are you talking about? I said, look, they're probably smart engineers, but they're not thinking about their number one metric. So they would launch and say San Francisco, then they'd say we're nationwide. Well, now it's peanut buttered the US.
And if you're trying to convert and get people to use your local marketplace, who cares if your next install is in New York? Right. And so we did the opposite. In fact, we drew a circle on a map with like 30 miles around our office. And we said, if we don't win here, we don't there's no business here.
And we spent a year just hammering on that circle, trying to figure out how do we get things to move. And so we would buy and sell things. Everything in here is from Opera, by the way. So my wife, 18, that's why it's in here. Oh, I love the idea. It's great. So you have to kind of fake it in early days. I'd show up and I'd buy the chair. I wouldn't say that I worked at OfferUp.
I would I would just pretend like I was a buyer. But then I hype it up, of course, like everyone uses it. I mean, well, no, I really did. So those are some of the benefit of doing as you're learning to you're talking to customers, you're getting some feedback. And so you do that a lot in the early days. Um, and that's important because that gets your, I call it the Petri dish phase, right?
You're figuring out the product or figure out and go to market. You're figuring out marketing. You're making sure that the metrics are working then. Okay. Now that works now show you can do that in other markets. And I think far too often I see entrepreneurs just throttling because they think they need a scale right away. And that's usually ends pretty badly. So we were very disciplined.
Like I said, we didn't end, we spent a year, one market before we went to any other markets.
I think Mark Adresin has said this, that great entrepreneurs can shape the world. And I believe in that. And it sounds kind of egotistical and maybe delusional too. But I think if you're getting after a problem space and you're doing something that's unique and you have the skills to go do it, you can make an impact. Yeah. Everyone said we couldn't compete with Craigslist. Everybody.
I get so many no's all the time. And look, half the country's installed OfferUp now. I think that shows just a relentless maybe ignorance and just like passion for something. But also I knew, I looked at the other products and I wasn't delusional. And I just felt like we could build a better product. I'm like, we could do it better. And so I think...
There's kind of a balance of that that you have to strike. And I think a relentlessness when you're building the company. People are too impatient, especially in this day and age. We're all in the TikTok swiping mode. And to build companies, it scales really hard. And it takes a long time. And I think most people just give up.
There was plenty of days to give up in the early days that we were doing it.
Yeah. So we, again, going back to that circle idea, like, okay, what is the metric you're trying to move? And so we tried every experiment you could imagine. Like we even rented a long haul moving truck and put a thousand helium balloons in there with off-road branding. And we went to the densest neighborhood we can find and we just blanketed it with off-road branding. It looks cool.
So imagine coming to a neighborhood everywhere you looked. And my theory was like, it was the idea was, hey, we're going to, it's like lighting the, lighting a brush fire. Like, hey, we can get everyone to buy and sell and maybe that's the spark and that kind of expands. that was a big waste of time. Didn't really do a whole lot, but it gives you an idea of the type of experiments that we ran.
So, you know, we ran everything, we measured everything. And ultimately we tried things like Google and Facebook that yielded pretty good results. And we kept doubling down on that and, you know, kind of repeated that playbook throughout the country to the point when you get enough scale, you don't have to really market as much locally. You could just do it, you know, nationally, but,
And so over the years, we started to spend more time doing that. I mean, you name it, we've done TV, radio. I don't know if we've ever done a billboard, but we've tried a lot of experiments. So I think in the early days, it's about thinking about as many ideas as you can and how fast can you test and work. to see what, which one of those moves the needle. We didn't, we didn't know, honestly.
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