Topmate Discourse Summarized: A founder with $50 million networth selling a UseIntro slot for $5K on how to fundraise is equivalent to someone 2 years out of college, with $25K savings selling 200 rupee slot on how to get a referral.

Topmate’s issue is that it is low status. UseIntro is not. The high number on UseIntro, even if the proportion of cost/networth is the same, makes people feel they are getting premium access. Also assume these successful people are using it as a filter for top of the funnel access.

The low number on Topmate causes a visceral reaction. You are selling your time for the cost of a meal on Swiggy? This leads to questions around legitimacy. Though some of these people might be using a price barrier as filter too, so that only serious people reach out to them.

This is similar to Cameo. Initially everyone was excited to get birthday messages from celebrities. Then they started asking which tier of celebrities will be doing greetings for 100 dollars. Instead of it being a high status thing to get a message from these celebs, it became low status. “Wow, the best you could do was this C-grade old TV actor doing birthday greetings?” This is why Cameo’s growth also plateaued. A fun gimmick. Nothing more.

This is a pretty interesting problem statement for marketplace PMs. Marketplaces want to lower cost so that there is more demand and market expansion.

This is why Swiggy had Swiggy Pop. Zepto has their own version of DMart sale.

And of course they then upsell on the flow. Try to increase your frequency of purchase. Layer on more fees later. Give less discount. And try to extract more from its power users.

In marketplaces with the status angle, high-ticket items (Shreyas Doshi) won’t participate with a PM with one year experience selling referrals. So most supply will be homogeneous (in terms of their experience, status in the eyes of demand, and skillset). Demand side (referral and career advice seekers) will be homogeneous too. You can’t segment them more and extract more LTV. A middle manager hoping to be an exec is probably not looking for mentoring on Topmate.

So maybe treating this marketplace like Fiverr is the way to go. Low status. No one is proud of selling referrals for so low. Question is as supply becomes high status do they churn? Do they stop putting Topmate links on their bio? This would decrease top of the funnel for Topmate. In the future will it become low status for even early employees to have a Topmate profile?