SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
760: This Site Has Sold $3m Worth of Athletes Old Gear
23 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: What is SidelineSwap and how does it operate?
Brandon, one of the founders of SidelineSwap that came on over a year ago had done a small amount of transaction volume, around 400 grand. They're now over $3 million in total transaction volume, of which 2 million has come in the first few months of 2017. They make money by taking 12% of that transaction.
They have over 15,000 athletes that are selling their old or lightly used gear on their site amongst other things. Over 23,000 buyers have bought from those 15,000 sellers growing about 30% month over month in both transaction volume and revenue with their team of 10 scattered throughout the country, but mainly in Boston.
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Chapter 2: What growth metrics is SidelineSwap seeing in 2017?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. this episode 760 coming up tomorrow morning we're going to learn from jim larrison he's raised 63 million dollars with 20 of the top 200 companies use his tool to communicate with employees so what's the tool and how to get such big market penetration
hello everyone today my guest is brendan cannon he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called sideline swap an online marketplace where athletes buy and sell their sports gear the company has over 100 000 users participated in 500 startups and raised 1.5 million dollars in venture funding. Brendan, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. Let's do it. Awesome, man.
So we had you on back about almost a year ago.
Chapter 3: How does SidelineSwap balance supply and demand in its marketplace?
And at that point, you had hit about $2 million in revenue. And I'm going to go in here quickly and just repeat some of these numbers. So at that time, you had processed about $400,000 in total kind of transaction volume, I think, between athletes and people buying athletes' old gear. You took a 12% cut at that time when mostly it was from the seller, the athletes selling their goods.
And you had about 3,000 sellers, about 6,000 buyers founded in 2015. All that right? Yeah. Yep, those numbers sound about right. It's a good memory, right? Yeah.
Chapter 4: What unique strategies did SidelineSwap use to attract sellers?
No, I'm kidding. I'm reading that off my sheet.
I was trying to think as you're saying. I'm like, all right. Well, we've come much further than I thought off the top of my head.
Yeah, so update us. How's the business?
Where's it at? Business is good. We've had a great year.
Chapter 5: What types of products are sold on SidelineSwap?
We are looking to do about 5 to 6 million in top line sales this year. We grew 30% month over month last month.
uh got a lot of exciting things on the works on the product perspective we just launched our ios app um i think we're like two two and a half three x most of the numbers you mentioned so things are pretty good and when you say five you said five million in top line sales over the past 12 months or that's what you'll do in 2017 that's what we'll do in 2017 um
I don't know the trailing 12 month number off the top of my head, but, uh, we're, we're well over, we're getting close to 2 million year to date. Um, and with the growth that we're on, we're, we're pretty confident we're gonna hit those numbers.
And is that help people understand what sideline swap is in case they didn't hear the first episode and tell us what you mean when you say revenue, is that transaction volume or is that actually the cut you're taking from all the transaction volume?
Sure. So Sideline Swap's a platform, a marketplace platform, where athletes can list gear for sale for free. So any sports equipment, new or used, and we drive traffic to the website for people to buy that stuff. We...
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Chapter 6: How does SidelineSwap leverage social media for marketing?
Take a 12% cut. So our top KPI is gross merchandise volume. So we look at how many sales are we driving through the platform. We take a 12% cut of that. That would be our net revenue.
Okay, got it. So when you tell me you're going to do 5 million in revenue, I should multiply that times about nine to get total.
Other way around.
Other way. Okay.
Chapter 7: What challenges does SidelineSwap face as a marketplace?
So multiply 5 million times 12%. You're going, damn, I wish it was those numbers.
Yeah, that'd be nice. But I mean, we, uh, I mean, there's a $60 billion industry for sporting goods. Um, so we're just scratching the surface of what, what we could do. Um, so, but you know, we'll have to get to a pretty large volume to, uh, get to the revenue numbers we want to see.
Yeah. Okay. So just to sum this up, so 2017, you think you'll do about $5 million in transaction volume about halfway through the year, which is today, you've already passed about 2 million at your growth rate. Those numbers are pretty accurate.
Chapter 8: What are the future plans for SidelineSwap?
That's right. And then where are you in terms of so last time we spoke, which is again, about a year ago, you had 3000 sellers on your platform that had sold, you know, call it or listed at least, you know, one piece of their old gear, and you had 6000 buyers. What are those numbers today?
For sellers, we're around 15,000 sellers and about 23,000, 24,000 buyers.
That's great. So one of the things I want to focus on in this interview that we didn't touch on last time is kind of the, you know, first off, marketplaces are really freaking tough. I mean, you know this. How did you saw, I mean, like give me, I'm assuming like you're a creative guy. You did some weird shit. You had to have, otherwise it wouldn't be working.
Like what is the weird stuff you did to grow the sellers and the buyers on your platform?
Yeah, so I mean, we had to get very scrappy to get this off the ground. I mean, it's a two sided marketplace. So we have to acquire supply through sellers. And we also have to drive traffic. And that has to stay pretty much in line. If you get too much supply, sellers are unhappy, because they're not getting enough sales.
If you drive too much demand without enough supply, you don't convert on any of those people visiting your website. So the way we got this started, we We had pretty unique insight into the sporting goods world of where there was inventory that was sitting in garages, warehouses, and equipment rooms.
So what we did was we went to former college athletes, professional athletes, and other people in the industry who had accumulated piles of gear over their years of playing in some cases, or in some cases they were liquidating college equipment rooms or professional equipment rooms. We took that, got supply on the site, and it was really unique inventory.
So think like we had Jimmy Vesey, who's on the New York Rangers now, sell his college hockey stuff from Harvard. We had like 25% of the former college lacrosse players come on and sell their stuff. We had a bunch of guys from the U.S. ski team do the same. So we get this highly desirable gear. for these guys who were not selling otherwise.
And then we drive demand through largely through social media in the beginning. So we were able to do it cheaply. We have 180,000 Instagram followers, close to 70,000 Facebook fans, push this really unique product through social media, through our social media channels and through influencers. And then that drove demand onto the site. Then every athlete,
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