How did you come up with the idea of Trainpub, what is your background?
As athletes, we have acquired experience, knowledge and skills over many years. This know-how is often not used to generate revenue. After the career, this know-how is often even completely lost. To counteract this problem, we were looking for a way to enable not only athletes but also sports providers to offer their know-how on a marketplace in a few steps and free of charge.
How did you approach your business idea? Did you write a business plan first, did you test the idea, etc.?
First, we wrote our idea on paper. How do we want to solve the problem with our product? For this we needed feedback. We collected this from various people. We did not present our idea, but rather asked to what extent the sports knowledge can be passed on. We found out that the costs and the effort to offer the know-how is the biggest obstacle. It is at this obstacle that Trainpub should make its appearance.
What is your message to all entrepreneurs in the early stages of a marketplace?
A clear direction is the be-all and end-all of a startup. Tasks should be divided and responsibilities clearly defined. A weekly update helps to stay on track. We missed this in the initial phase. We could have been more efficient here. The second point is the MVP. Here we learned that not everything has to be realized to find out if a product works and if there is a need.
What were the reasons for choosing Sharetribe Flex? Did you also consider other solutions?
After much research, we found Sharetribe Flex to be the most solution-oriented approach. Sharetribe offered exactly what we wanted.
What type of marketplace have you chosen? (b2b, b2c, p2p)
On our marketplace, providers of sports offers can share their knowledge and skills. These can be booked by users of the marketplace in just a few steps. The B2C approach is the one where we see the greatest potential.
What is special about this type of marketplace and what integrations would you recommend to ensure a good flow?
In our marketplace, we have to serve two types of customers equally. The marketplace only works if enough suppliers offer their products/offers. We promote these offers to attract people interested in sports to the marketplace and inspire them to take up sports. A flawless online marketplace is essential. Thanks to Sharetribe Flex and the work of our developers we were able to realize this in a very short time.
What is special about the logistics process for these types of marketplaces?
The beauty of an online marketplace is that it doesn’t require any logistics processes. We simply help people interested in sports to meet, play sports, and have fun doing so via our marketplace.
What are your biggest challenges/bottlenecks? How did you solve them?
It takes a lot of effort to bring good suppliers to our marketplace. We underestimated this. We are still in the process of using suitable acquisition procedures to improve this by outsourcing part of the acquisition.
What is your plan for scaling the product in the future?
Since our product is a pure e-commerce product in the form of an online marketplace, we can scale sales over the next few years without major investments and fixed costs. This requires staying power, motivation, and commitment.
what do you have coming up in the next 6 months?
We want to continuously increase the number of visitors to our website over the next few months. To achieve this, we are investing more in marketing and in vendor:in acquisition In addition
we intend, thanks to the help of the Mindset team, to implement dynamic landing pages to generate more traffic to our marketplace.
