SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

Ep. 162 - What Most SaaS Teams Get Wrong About Growth

• Ken Lempit • Season 4 • Episode 15

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Guest: Sjoerd Handgraaf, Chief Marketing Officer at Sharetribe

The most overlooked growth lever in SaaS? Positioning.

In this episode, Sharetribe CMO Sjoerd Handgraaf reveals how redefining product positioning transformed their trajectory—and why many SaaS companies are still getting it wrong.

Handgraaf takes us inside Sharetribe’s journey from chasing big logos to doubling down on their true customer: non-technical marketplace founders. Along the way, he shares hard-won insights about product-market fit, AI disruption, and why going “back to basics” in marketing may be more transformational than the next tech trend.

📌 Key Takeaways:

  • The Power of Saying No
    Why Sharetribe walks away from enterprise deals—and how that clarity unlocked faster product development, happier customers, and less internal chaos.
  • Product-Market Fit is a Moving Target
    What feels like “fit” today can vanish tomorrow. Sjoerd explains why it's not a one-time milestone, but a constant process of adaptation.
  • The AI Threat is Real—but Misunderstood
    Low-code and AI-assisted development may lower technical barriers, but they don’t replace the need for reliability, support, and fit-for-purpose tools.
  • Content Marketing That Converts
    Sharetribe’s global growth is powered by giving first—through books, podcasts, and resources that attract high-intent buyers before they’re even in-market.
  • Global from Day One
    How to build a self-serve SaaS product that scales globally—even from a startup hub like Finland.

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Kenneth Lempit  00:25

welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs and GTM leaders to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Sjoerd Handgraaf, Chief Marketing Officer at Sharetribe, a platform that builds itself as the easiest way to create a successful marketplace business. Sjoerd, welcome to the podcast. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  00:47

Thanks for having me. 


Kenneth Lempit  00:48

I'm really excited to have you. I love this idea of building communities or marketplaces, and it's a really exciting area that we haven't touched on at all on the podcast in over 160 episodes. So you get to, you get to break us into the topic. But before we dig in, could you please tell us more about what share tribe is, who it's for, and your background? 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  01:11

Yeah, so you mentioned already a little bit. We're indeed, the fastest way to build a successful marketplace business. Essentially, we are SaaS business. That's why, of course, we're on the podcast. It is in sort of our articles of association that it is our goal to democratize the sharing economy by making platform technology accessible to everyone, which is kind of a mouthful, but essentially, we build marketplace software for founders, so for anyone who has the you know, what's commonly known as the Airbnb for x or Uber for X, type of ideas like two sided platform, multiple parties on each side, and you try to connect them on the platform. If you have a business idea like that, then share drive is probably a very good option to check out if you can deal with shared drive, because it wouldn't require you to have a developer or a boatload of money up front. I myself, I'm actually a large major, like a English teacher who immigrated to Finland and then was forced to work in the tech startups because they have a very different education system here. But I've been working here in tech startup for the last 15 plus years, and sort of not consciously, but when I look back, I've always been working in these sort of democratizing technology so my first job was at a website building company like truly, just sort of when weeks and Squarespace wasn't even around then. Then I worked for a music app, which was, like, sort of democratized Music Learning, and a couple more of those. And now, for the last eight years, I have been at shared tribe with a lot of joy, a lot of ups and downs, but I'm sure we'll discuss that's an exciting place to be, you know, enabling other entrepreneurs and probably a lot of great, you know, great successes and good feeling being in that kind of business. 


Kenneth Lempit  02:43

So that's very cool. Let's talk about how to make that meaningful in our practice. And when we look at companies, a lot of times, positioning is overlooked. Companies don't do the work to have great positioning, great messaging. From our point of view, that's sort of key to sustainable growth. And you mentioned in our prep call, you know, returning to the basics as being perhaps more transformational, more transformational than any AI driven innovation. Can you talk to us about how repositioning changed the trajectory at sharetribe, and why this is important and why it can be overlooked? 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  03:21

Yeah, it's yeah, maybe data has been more transformational, at least for us internally. Like, let's see how the market thinks about this in a couple years. The company has been around for a long time and originally started as a sort of sharing platform on a university. So the two founders, I'm not a founder, I'm a very early employee, but not the founder. They were part of a research project that he's a key technical university here, with the goal to sort of make the campus more sustainable. So it was really like a lending platform, you know, like, we're throwing a party tonight who has a smoke machine that kind of like announcement kind of thing. And then the research project ended, and they're like, Hey, we really like this, like building a thing. So they wanted to turn it into business. And they tried to sell the platform to other universities. But anyone who has ever done any business with, like higher education institutions, knows that as a five year sales cycle. So that's not a great way to do a startup. And while they were there, like while they were sort of in that world, they just ran into a lot of other entrepreneurs who had these kind of sharing ideas, but they all ran into the same problem, namely, they needed to build the platform first. And of course, most of them not being super technical. And that's sort of where the idea for shared who got born. So we had a first version, like, maybe already 2011 which is like, which is more like a WordPress for marketplaces, like, really fully online. You log in, you create an account, it's live and running. It was super fast, but it had a clear technical sort of ceiling in terms of customization. So, so we had a lot of successful customers. We also had a lot of customers who failed. I could talk more about that later. I mean, it's the nature of startups that, you know, 99 out of 100 fail, if the odds aren't even worse. But the ones that were successful, they ran into this, like technical problem. They needed some feature that we weren't providing them and we didn't giveAn option to build. And so we for a long time, we were like the fastest to get built. I'll say this now so I can pull this later into the positioning story to fully answer your question. But I thought this background is a little bit important. So then we build a second product, which is more like a marketplace, back end as a service, or we call it like a headless API. It was around the time when all this headless CMSs became came into the world around 2018 and it's basically a collection of APIs on which people could then build their website or their mobile app. But that created another problem, namely that it wasn't so easy to get started. And so then we realized that, okay, hey, we need actually a product that does both of those. And then we started realizing that, okay, we have been actually having really terrible positioning for a really long time, because we have these two very different products where the value props are actually really, really different. And so once we started building the new product, which is sort of this, sort of like no code layer on top of the marketplace back end, which has the best of both worlds, theoretically, we sat down and really started looking at, okay, who are we? What are we building like we there's this great book by April Dunford. It's called, obviously awesome. I recommend it for any small SaaS business, which is like a really, sort of like a workshop for positioning for startups. And see really nicely, because if you look at the classical, you know, the marketing classics, like Ogilvy and other of those positioning books, they're great if you're, like, Coca Cola or like, it's a massive company, but there's not super applicable for small companies. But April's book is really great for that. And that really got us thinking about, who are we serving, and maybe most importantly, who are we not serving? What are we not building? Because here we are a small company, and you get, you know, you we try to listen to customers, and customers have this feedback, and everybody has a slightly different idea of what we're building and who we're building this for. And that goes like across the team. So it goes for product. It influences what gets selected in the roadmap. It influences how support Answers question, influences marketing, how they're going to market. And so once we went to this workshop, we listed all of the competitive alternatives of building a marketplace, and not just direct competitors, but we just looked at, what other ways can you do this, right? And I think one is a really nice example. I don't think it's from the book, but some other research that I did around is that for most size businesses, the best competitive alternatives is Excel. You know, like, if you look at all the marketing things like, the competitive alternative is Excel. So you need to figure out a story for all of those, like, how you're different. And once we had a really clear, like, clearly defined positioning for us, it became so much easier to say no to customers, to make the product roadmap, to realize what marketing channels are for us and which aren't. So from then on, like that was, this is why I said in the prep call, like, this was transformational for us, because, like, I can tell maybe a little bit more about, like, for example, how it changed our perspective on enterprise.Because, like, as a SaaS business, especially starting out like big logos are, are extremely attractive, right? You get a big company towards you. Nobody knows you. You want to. It's, it's you want almost 


Kenneth Lempit  08:05

you want the credibility, right? So you, you 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  08:07

correct. 


Kenneth Lempit  08:07

You either go after or accept the big logo 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  08:11

100% Yeah, because no one knows who you are, especially for a business like ours, like where people sort of built, where the backbone of anyone's business, credibility and reliability is so important. What it's easy to forget, especially for startups that, like, the one thing that big corporation, big logos, have that you don't is, like, time valve. I said, like, in a startup, you're like, just slowly dying. And while for like, Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a bit rough, but it is, like, especially, like, early on, it is the truth. 


Kenneth Lempit  08:40

So you're basically staving off death, right? 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  08:42

That's, yeah, no, but that's the job. I mean, you know, when they talk about a runway, like, really, literally, like, that's what it is at one point you're going to drop off, or the runway is going to end, so that that is, like, so Anyway, coming back to the thing that, like, it can work out also really, well, I've also had partnerships with big companies that do work out. But for shared tribe, it just didn't, because big enterprises, they need features that we're never going to build, and then coming back, you know, through our mission, we're about, like, democratization, so we're never going to build, or it will never be high on our roadmap to build, like corporate single sign on, for example, those kind of things, or even taking on a customer. We can still take on enterprise customers, we are very clear up front that, no, we don't have any ISO certification. You can send, like, super heavy forms to our, like, small back end operations for to fill out for every time you want to make a change around, like, certain security things. We're not doing any custom payment deals. Like we're fully self service, because that's who we are serving for. And that sounds a bit weird, but it say, has saved us an incredible amount of time trouble and disappointment with the team and customers. And yeah, so that's like, that is definitely for us, something that we've learned like, and we've had big names like fortune 500 companies, big global giants, working with us, or trying internal projects with us. And we realized that that's just not like We rather be without logos like we rather have a couple of, and that's what we have right now on the website. We have not a couple. Actually, we have quite many small to medium businesses, or people who are like around now. We have a couple who are around at series A but also people who have just built a lifestyle business to support themselves. And that should give the credibility that customers are actually after, rather than the big logos. 


Kenneth Lempit  10:21

so the the customers they see look like themselves. So you have like, this virtuous cycle of people seeing other businesses that they might aspire to be, as opposed to just being impressed by, right? 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  10:34

Yeah, that's for us. That is like, and this is something that also we learned a lot, right? Like, I'm telling you now, like, what I'm telling you now sort of the result of, like, 80 years of like, failing regularly at these things, right? So, so, for example, we have our own podcast called two sided. It's about where I interview like, big marketplace founders, or I've interviewed one of the founders from Kickstarter, for example, one of the earliest employees of Airbnb, those type of things, just to discover, like, what makes marketplaces successful, and we like to share that information with our customers, but we regularly get feedback from some of the listeners who are some of them are our customers. Some of them are not like, Hey, I would like to hear from someone who's just like, one trench ahead of me. They want to just know, how do they figure out? For example, in marketplaces, this big thing that everybody runs into is called, like the chicken and the egg problem, right? Like, you don't have a business about the suppliers, and you need the buyers to get the suppliers or the other way around. And it's a little bit different for each marketplace. And there is, like, you know, an endless variety of solving that problem, but how to figure out which is a good one? So yeah, so that's why we sort of stick with what we know enterprises are welcome, but they need to behave like small players. And we still have some of course, but we are really about helping people build their first marketplace. 


Kenneth Lempit  11:45

So like that. Narrower positioning also means you can help them right, to solve for the chicken and egg. I imagine you have advice for your customers on how to grow their businesses, right? 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  11:58

Absolutely, yeah, we have, like, coming back again to like, actually, what we mentioned earlier, like the reliability, like,the thing is that we're not like, shared up is not a, let's say complimentary software. I always say like, we're not like a CRM for car sales people, for example, whose business will continue to exist, even if our software is not there. Like, for most of our customers, I'd like to think that they wouldn't be in business if it wasn't for shared because they can't code themselves. They don't have enough funding initially to pay someone to code they're not technical enough to work with any of the other alternatives, so their business like dies and lives with us, and the other way around also. So that's why, for us, like, it's really important that we are reliable. And because we're a SaaS business, and we have a monthly plan getting more and more rare, I think in SaaS, people can quit the next month, right? So there is not a lot of point for us to sort of deceive customers, or to just have them, like pay and then just sit back. We really need to help them succeed. And so we've spent a lot of time over the years into building content and services for them to get indeed, past this initial phase, to help them figure out the really sort of pitfalls challenges, help them make better decisions. I mean, you work with loads of sauces also, I think, one of the biggest things that I see is that people are afraid to get out and actually talk to customers. They rather build one more feature, or they rather polish it up a little bit more. And like, I think, like with marketplaces, especially because you're building two businesses right? Like, you build a business for the supply side and you build a business for the demand side, it's so crucially important to just be out in the market really fast. And I think this is one of the things that that we try to really teach our customers, like, it's okay to be embarrassed about your first like, MVP, or whatever you want to call it. And so that's, I think, one of the lessons that we try to get across to them. But we have many like, I said, we have a podcast. Actually, we have multiple podcasts. We have the thing called the marketplace Academy. We have a book, actually, we have a book called The Lean marketplace. You can find it on Amazon. It's an adaptation of the Eric rises, the lean startup. But then, specifically for marketplace businesses, we sold 10,000 like last month, I think we passed 10,000 on Amazon. And anyone can use it, even if you never touch a shared drive product. If you're building a marketplace, you want code from scratch, take one of our competitors. It's fine. The book is still extremely valuable for you. And that's sort of our common approach to doing marketing anyway, to sort of like, give first and ask later. Like, if people need us, they'll they'll know about us, but they can also use everything we have without giving us a dime, kind of like, 


Kenneth Lempit  14:35

that's really fabulous. So you know, if you're listening and you think you have an idea for a marketplace business take advantage of those resources on share tribe. I want to kind of go backwards in the content here just a little bit, because one of the things you were talking about in terms of innovating on the product is really this idea of, you know, product market fit is not a thing. It's not a Single point in time. It's sort of like this continuous effort, right? Can you talk about how that played out for you, like, how you realized that as a business, and what that means for SaaS founders, especially, like, a lot of things are changing today for the SaaS industry. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  15:16

yeah, yeah. That's a like, I touched on that a little bit earlier, but, like, Yeah, this is maybe, you know, besides going back to, I think, when we had the pre interview, like the one, like the one learning that sort of marketing basics still count, right? It's not just you can't build a business on best practices only. Maybe that's sort of the summary of what my answer earlier. The other realization is that, like, Product Market Fit for everybody. You know, whenever you read any of these, like stories of businesses who made it, and then it said, always like, oh. And then we hit product market fit, and then we scale, like some kind of sequential thing that you, you know, you first do this, and then you do this, and then you do that. And for a while, I think we had product market fit, like with the first product, like, you know, customers kept coming in. It was so, like, we were growing so fast, churn was very much under control for the first like, let's say year, year and a half. So for a while we were like, Bob, we're sitting on gold. And then as the market changes, like, our product didn't change, but the market changed, right? And it is just like, I mean, it sounds really like, lame say, well, lame way of saying it, but it is product and market together, right? Like they need to fit. And if one of them changes, you better adapt the product also, because otherwise your fit will be gone. And so we started noticing that through a combination of places to churn increasing and just generally, conversion going down. People staying last long, you know, lifetime going down, etc, because their market had changed. The Table, stake have changed, right? And actually, there's a really nice, maybe parallel thing going on right now for many SaaS businesses, where the market has changed, because AI something in this environment has changed, like, radically. People's expectations have gone up, or have gone to a particular like, to a particular direction. And if you had previously had product market fit, you might be completely wiped away. Like, like what we discussed in the pre interview that, like, all of these AI, like things like, take Grammarly for example. I hope they're doing well. Maybe they're doing extremely well. Maybe they have adopted AI completely into their product. But there were certain products in the market that I feel that AI has just like, completely replaced, or the expectations of how these products should work has changed radically, and that's also the case for us, right? It's like there is this thing called, I don't know if you've heard of this, but this like vibe coding, where this is sort of like aI assisted coding, where the promise is basically that anyone can be a coder with this. And so why would you need a tool like sharecrop? If you can just take, you know, tell an AI and say, hey, you know, build me an Airbnb for X, build me a marketplace. And I don't know the answer to that, Mike, right now, like, this is a discussion very much going on into the company. I think, like one of the things, of course, because we tried out all of these tools, I think, like one of the things that I think those tools still don't really do is build something that you know is actually what's going on, right? Like, we've tried to build, of course, marketplace with these tools as well, and often, suddenly they break. Like you ask it to change one thing, and then something else breaks, and no one actually knows how the code works, right? Like, they put out code, but no one has documented it. No one's built it. Of course, some of them really nicely, like I use, for example, this replit. They have a great like IDE, like a sort of virtual development environment, and you can get into it, but if you're not a coder already, that's not a great value prop. And so for us, we need to start reacting to this, because there are certain things that people are expecting in this particular direction, and we need to maybe figure out, what are we offering as a product? Maybe some of what is our offer has actually changed, right? I don't know how you see that with your customers and AI, or maybe in your own workflow with AI. 


Kenneth Lempit  18:52

That's definitely all over the map. And what I'd say is, if your customer is going to remain a non technical business owner, a small or mid sized entrepreneur without a technical staff, it's kind of hard to imagine a world where that person builds their own functional, you know, mobile app or or web product, and especially as long as you remain ahead of what they need to run their business like if you look at their functional requirements and meet what they need to run their business, you know, why would they build it themselves? My early career was at Citibank, and we used to build an awful lot of proprietary technology, and Citi time was far and away the largest financial institution on the planet. I mean, it was many times larger than most of its competitors, and over time, they stopped building a lot of this tech in house, because it conferred no competitive advantage. And I think that's kind of the event horizon. Does it confer a competitive advantage? Can I do it? you know, to build something myself. And if it doesn't, I shouldn't, right? So I think that's gonna always be true. And I think for a business that focuses on smaller entrepreneur, smaller organizations up to, you know, 10 or 20 million in revenue, I mean, it's really hard for these organizations to build their own thing, yeah, actually, to build it better than you're gonna build it. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  20:22

No, exactly, yeah, that's also our bet. And this moment, like, truly at the moment of recording, because it's very much an active conversation we're having that, like, we just know in this particular niche of marketplaces, you don't need to reinvent everything. And it is, like, it is surprisingly complex, right? If you think about because we serve customers from like rental marketplaces, service marketplaces, reverse marketplace. So we have a marketplace where you know, where you put out a request for a work and then people react to it. We have a security testing we a marketplace like security testing, service marketplace, exchange. We have swimming pool rentals as a customer. So there is a, an almost infinite array of transaction models that need to go in there and like that. In itself is already, I mean, anybody has ever tried to implement a payment gateway in their, uh, software career, so I do feel there's still a lot, yeah, but, but it is, you know, it is exciting times. 


Kenneth Lempit  21:19

I think the the threat comes probably more from others who would copy your business model, right? So technically competent organizations that would say, Hey, this looks like a good business. I can do it too. Yeah. And then these AI development tools accelerate their entrance into the market. I think that's a that's a huge threat. It's interesting, because I think a lot of these firms are going to come to market, but they're not going to have capital. And I think that's one of the dynamics here, is that you can build something really cool, but if you can't bring it to market, then it's just going to become a dead end. And I think there's going to be a lot of that. You know, we meet a lot of entrepreneurs in the software space, as you can imagine. And one of the big hurdles, I think, to these cool things that people are building, one of the hurdles to their success is going to be actually building an organization, convincing venture capital that they are entrepreneurs worth placing a bet on, and scaling those organizations even in a more efficient way. I mean, yeah, we're gonna have to be more capital efficient, but we're we're still gonna need capital, and you're still gonna need to build an organization. Yeah, the idea that, you know, two or three guys can build $100 million software company and remain 2345, people, I think, is I just don't agree with that thinking. I believe, yeah, a little hard to imagine.


Sjoerd Handgraaf  22:46

I like the expression that I think they say, like, first time founders worry about products, second time founders worry about distribution, because they realize that actually, like, like, what's the most important? Like, if you there's no way for customers to access it in a way that works unit economic wise, then you don't have a business. So, so, yeah, I agree with that. 


Kenneth Lempit  23:04

I think there's going to be a lot of guys that are roadkill, you know, they're going to build cool stuff, yeah, gonna have capital to go to market. I just think that reckoning is coming. You know, we don't have enough. There's not enough in the news about that yet. But I, I'd say that's probably coming. I mean, we talk to those people, you know, they're like, Yeah, it's like, us, me and me and my two brothers, and we're, you know, we're gonna build the latest and greatest, you know. CRM, yeah, we have no plans to ever, you know, get capital. Well, there's other guys that are, you know, second, third, fourth time startup founder, right? And they're, they're going for capital. They have the same kind of ideas, yeah, but they're gonna go get capital and they're just gonna push you aside. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  23:44

yeah, yeah. I mean, as a counterpoint to that, though, I think, like I read about, wasn't the people from maybe one of these code AI tools may have been lovable, may have been another one I remember that are like a tiny team, like 20, and they scaled to in like, six months to 100 million. Arr, or some insane, like, statistically 


Kenneth Lempit  24:05

Sure. I mean, yes. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  24:07

for sure There's always exceptions to rule. I just wanted to point it out, because, like, that is, that is something that I've seen, and that also seems extremely exciting to me. 


Kenneth Lempit  24:13

Listen, I still play the lottery. When it goes to, like, it's more than 400 million, I figure the odds are correct. So, you know, I'll spend my couple of bucks on a lottery ticket. So, I mean, I just think, yeah, I guess it's just likelihood of success, right? Success Factors, there's, I watched success factors in a young company. One of them is adequate capitalization, yeah? And to get capital today, we need to be capital efficient, understood. Yeah, it's sort of the it's the fuel. I want to touch briefly, because it's a business area we did for a very long time on just projecting your business globally from a place like Finland, right? You're the first company that we've interviewed or and the First one I've met, not that I'm aware of, from the Nordic countries, and I'm just sort of curious, like, if you had two or three things you would recommend founding teams, think about, if you're starting from Western Europe, and you know that your addressable market largely still includes the United States, how you're going to make that happen?


Sjoerd Handgraaf  25:21

Yeah. I mean, for us, I think it will be a bit of challenge, like, you know, like this, I'm going to start with consulting, management consulting answer, which is, like, it depends. Of course, it will depend. However, I think it's definitely not impossible. I think a lot of it has to do with, how do your customers discover you, right? And for us. How do customers discover us? If you think about, well, who is our ideal customer is someone who is a aspiring marketplace entrepreneur. They haven't started building yet. Their business idea has to have these, like particular, two sided dynamics. Otherwise, we're not a good fit. That is not a profile. Why? And ideally also, they prefer to do it, they're either non technical, or they prefer to do it sort of in a non technical way, like not coding, and they probably don't want to spend money, or they don't have the money, like, honestly that. Those are the sort of characteristics of our, like, ideal customer persona. Now you can't go online and score a list of those people. Or you can go to like LinkedIn navigator and say, Hey, these are the people I want to do now, the other thing you can do is like demographics. But if you look at our most successful customers, demographics are are all over the place. There's like, men, women, old, young students, you know, people who have built six businesses before, like it is all over the place. And so for us, the way that people find us is through how they interact on the web, primarily through content. So if you search, we try to be anywhere where people talk about how to build a marketplace. So whether that is they search in Google, whether they are part of some entrepreneurship community, whether it's Reddit, although we should be way, way, way more active there, we try to be there and that, you know, this is why, what I said earlier about, like, it's a sort of like, what is the I don't know what's the expression in English, but sort of a tool that has like, two sides, like, it's not only this, but it does two things. I want to say, like both sides of the metal, but that's usually a good thing and a bad thing. But this metal has two good things, and namely, like, this content thing. So not only, like I previously explained, does it help our customers be more successful, but it also dramatically improves, sort of our footprint globally. And we 


Kenneth Lempit  27:27

ideal content marketing, right? You know, it's content you can use to educate yourself and also allow you to be discovered.  exactly,


Sjoerd Handgraaf  27:33

exactly, yeah, and so that is how we handled this initially, like we started, of course, like globally, from the start, like we've not been, I think what many companies also in Finland, especially, I think it's gotten a lot better over the past, whatever decade, but, but that people feel like, oh, let's do the domestic market first, and then we go abroad. I think that is, if you want to go global, you should go global, like, immediately. So that's what we did. And initially we did a lot through this, like discovering or like, sort of from a discovery angle. So people came to us now we do more and more sort of, let's say, halfway outbound. So we try to have partnership with incubators, accelerators. I talked to a lot of marketplace investors, those kind of things, just to sort of broaden, like, the touch points that we have. It's not without challenges. Because, like, if we have only for the last, since maybe three years ago, did we get an employee who's based in the US, who actually started with us in Finland, but was an American now based in San Diego? Because at some point, customers reach a point like we're lucky to have customers who've been with us for many, many years and are building an actual serious business where, where they need to be able to be assisted in their own office hours, which, of course, we cover a lot, like we have evening shifts here, also for support, etc. But I think that has been the challenge. So I think initially there is no challenge there, especially if you have a self service task, right? And this is why is that. It depends if you need a lot of touch points during the onboarding during the sales cycle, it's going to be a very different story. But for self service based sauce like us and like, like, there are many others, it's very much possible until you reach a certain scale of customer where you just need to provide them with a service that is preferably like in their own time. It's been exciting. One of the challenges with us has also been that people sometimes don't realize that we're abroad because we are like from the outside, not a super international organization like you wouldn't really tell that by just looking superficially at our side. We don't really talk about that. And maybe that's actually the last thing I want to say about this, is that there is this cultural challenge where people from the Nordics, especially Finland, they are like, under a promise over delivered. They don't like we're not used to talking a lot upfront. We'd rather show it. And that is just not something that in especially in the US, sometimes people expect, they just think, Oh, God, this product can't be as good, otherwise they would be much more sort of loudmouth about it. So like that is, I think that's a big lesson for us that we've learned that, like, we need to sometimes be More confident and just be, be like, be really saying that, no, actually, we are probably the best one. You see, I can't even say it 


Kenneth Lempit  30:07

hard, hard to say, right? 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  30:08

hard to say. 


Kenneth Lempit  30:09

But I'd say that actually, there's great stuff for for you, perhaps to follow up on and others who are in Europe or elsewhere, you know, looking at the US as a primary market where something like 22 distinct nations. You know, it's very tempting to look at the US market as monolithic, right? I'm originally from New York. That's a very different culture than somebody who's from Missouri, like our revenue officer Jason Myers, Missouri. They call Missouri the show me state, not the tell me state, right? Because Missourians, they want to know you can do what you say, right? And you know, if you're looking at Texas, you know, they have this expression, big hat, no cattle, right? So the idea is, you know, if you're too out there, you create skepticism. Do you actually have? Can you back up? You say, so we have 22 or so distinct cultural identities at the same time, though, it can be said that we do like a good show, yeah? So kind of universally, we like a good show. So that rises, you know, you see that in celebrity culture, right? So, yeah, certain celebrities become kind of universal in American culture, because we like showmanship, whether it's in entertainment or politics or indeed, even in business. You know, Steve Jobs used to run his product launches, and the streaming would break the internet, right? So, yeah, the internet, such as it was at the time. So, so it's a little bit of a internal inconsistency, but I think you're absolutely right. Probably a good place to be generally a little bit showier. Just make sure you can back it up. Yeah. Speaking of shows, that's a great place to land this show. Sjoerd, You know, this was a great episode. I hope that you enjoyed being on SaaS backwards, and please let our listeners know how they can learn more about sharetribe and reach out to you if they have questions. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  32:12

Well, so first of all, about sharetribe, you can just go to our website, sharetribe.com, also, if you are an aspiring marketplace founder, or you just want to talk marketplace, you can always reach out to me. That's s, j, o, e, r, d, at sharetribe.com or pick my name from the episode and just add me on LinkedIn. I am always happy to chat everything marketplaces. And of course, if I can pitch my own podcast, you can also check out two sided the marketplace podcast. We just released a whole new season talking to the world's top marketplace investors, so there's AI, a lot of AI, and a lot of really cool insights. And I want to thank you for having me. It's been a super nice conversation, and I learned a lot also here still. So thanks a lot. 


Kenneth Lempit  32:53

That's great. Yeah, this is an awesome episode. Thank you. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please find SaaS backwards on any podcast directory. You can also find the podcast on YouTube. We have our own channel. My LinkedIn is LinkedIn slash in slash Ken lempit, and my demand generation agency for SaaS businesses is Austin Lawrence, and we're at Austin lawrence.com Sjoerd Handgraaf, thank you so much for being on the podcast. 


Sjoerd Handgraaf  33:24

Thanks for having me Take care.