Matt Collins

  • About
  • Contact

Matt Collins

inspiring view of landscape
Product Management

Product Vision and Strategy – Advice from Marty Cagan

How do you feel about your company’s product vision, product strategy and product roadmap? These are high-leverage areas where many companies could sharpen their thinking and ways of working to become more effective. One of my favourite product management experts, Marty Cagan (author of Inspired), was recently interviewed on the ‘This Is Product Read more…

By Matt Collins, 3 years3 years ago
forest
Entrepreneurship

15 Marketplace Startups That Have Raised Over $50 Million

One of the interesting things about online marketplaces is their inherent network effects. They’re hard to get going (not least because of the chicken-and-egg problem) but — if successful — can become very valuable as it’s hard for other businesses to compete. As a result of this defensibility, online marketplaces Read more…

By Matt Collins, 3 years3 years ago
chicken
Marketplaces

How to Use Scarcity to Hack the Marketplace Chicken-and-Egg Problem

Solving the chicken-and-egg problem is a key one for any marketplace business. Here’s one hack that uses scarcity to help with solving it. What is the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem? When you’re starting a marketplace, you typically have no customers and no suppliers. With no customers, it’s hard to get suppliers Read more…

By Matt Collins, 3 years3 years ago
code audit
Entrepreneurship

How to Hire a CTO

How do you find and hire a CTO for your business? As a business owner you might be looking to find a CTO for a number of reasons: You have an established business and are looking for someone with the experience to help you use technology more effectively and strategically. Read more…

By Matt Collins, 5 years3 years ago
Entrepreneurship

How Hired.com Started a Fast-Growing Careers Marketplace

If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and has raised Read more…

By Matt Collins, 5 years4 years ago
Hands in a swirling pattern
Entrepreneurship

7 Frameworks For Predicting Online Marketplace Success

What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental differences between the industries they chose to play in or Read more…

By Matt Collins, 6 years3 years ago
Entrepreneurship

How Thumbtack Built a Huge Local Services Marketplace

How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs. So how did Thumbtack get where they are? What tactics are behind Read more…

By Matt Collins, 7 years4 years ago
E-commerce

What is the Average Churn Rate for a Subscription Box Business?

What churn rate can you expect for your subscription box business? What’s a good churn rate? What’s a bad churn rate? If you haven’t yet launched, what number should you put in your business plan? I wrote in a previous post about typical subscription e-commerce retention rates and how, when considering launching a subscription Read more…

By Matt Collins, 7 years4 years ago
Entrepreneurship

How to Find a Good WordPress Developer on oDesk

You have a WordPress blog or website. You want some changes made to it, so you need to find someone who can help. But who? One effective way to find a WordPress developer is through a freelancing website like oDesk or Elance. But finding the right person can be very Read more…

By Matt Collins, 7 years7 years ago
Entrepreneurship

Skillshare: How to Build a Marketplace for Online Education

I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll Read more…

By Matt Collins, 8 years5 years ago

Posts navigation

1 2 … 10 Next

Matt's a product and technology consultant based in London, helping businesses build good digital products and services in smart ways.

He is passionate about building the right things as well as building things right.

Prior to helping other companies with product and technology, Matt was co-founder and CTO at several startups and a software engineer at Cisco Systems.

Matt has an MBA from INSEAD and a degree in Maths and Computation from Oxford University.

If you're interested in working together, please contact Matt here.

© Copyright 2020 Hillclear Ventures Ltd, 3 Whitstable Close, Beckenham, BR3 4TZ, United Kingdom

Registered in England and Wales as company number 09449834 · VAT Number 258 1236 06


Hestia | Developed by ThemeIsle