Ep 420: How Woulter Delbaere Started Mangtas

Sean: And what I love about that story out there is you were actually trying to build something else and you found some problems along the way, some roadblocks, and you just tried solving it yourself and this is where you wound up. And how is it doing now? How many people are on your team? How many customers have signed up?

Walter: Yeah, I'm happy to talk a little bit about that. But back to your original point first, it is very, very important to know when to pivot to also continuously find you. Right. We really have this philosophy of really going extremely quick, failing quick, learning quickly, and adapting extremely quickly. And really, we don't claim to know everything to the contrary, but we do learn very quickly and that's really our philosophy. And just going back to what I always say, like if we took that - say, six, seven, eight months to build the product, the platform that we envisioned at the very beginning, it would have been beautiful. It would have had all bells and whistles, but it would not have been fit for purpose because we didn't get that immediate. So we were crappy, scrappy, very early on, very uncomfortable. What we threw out there was embarrassing. But that wasn't the point of it. It was about traction learning, getting feedback, and just evolving from there. So we became mature quite quickly. Right. But anyway, let me get back to your question. So so that leads into my end to the second part of your question, to be honest, which is we have a marketplace live, right? And in all honesty, people tell me, yeah, what's the status of it? It's life. But it was life, like I said earlier, in ten days. Right. It is still life. It's just improved. It's better. It's definitely at MVP level four for what we need it for and beyond. Like it's fine-tuned for scale. It's fine-tuned for different devices. It works properly and it's self-service, so it's fit for the purpose that way.

We have now over 800 vendors on our marketplace. We have also decided to really focus on a specific type of service which is really in the tech space. So we initially started very broad where we had digital marketing, we had business development, we had software development and say, let's do outsourcing holistically, B2B, so we can be that single solution for anyone that wants to outsource. We could upsell that way, which was great. But what we also found is we took things to superficial, to high level. A critical part of what we do is vetting, which is also going to be part of my answer, which is we vet not only the businesses that provide the service to a very high level. Right. And make sure we guarantee once we put yourself stamp of approval that you're dealing with a legitimate business.

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