How Our Book Publishing Services Marketplace Hit $1M/Month In Gross Merchandise Value

Hello! I’m Ricardo Fayet, one of the four founders and the Chief Marketing Officer of Reedsy.
First and foremost, Reedsy is a marketplace connecting authors (or anyone looking to publish a
book) with all the people they’ll need to prepare, publish, and market that book successfully —
think editors, proofreaders, cover designers, illustrators, ghostwriters, book marketers, and
even literary translators.
Since starting in 2014, the marketplace has become home to over 1,500 vetted freelance
professionals and close to a million authors, driving 1,000+ projects every month with a GMV of
over $1m.
I didn’t come up with the idea — my co-founder, a long-time friend, and Reedsy CEO Emmanuel
did. He first mentioned it to me during university, and out of all the (many) startup ideas I’d
heard by that point, it was the only one I found really promising.
This was in part because it tackled a specific industry: book publishing. But more importantly, it
leveraged two exciting trends: on one hand, the exponential growth of self-publishing, and on
the other, the growing freelance economy movement in traditional publishing — which at the
time, was already driving many talented editors and literary professionals out of in-house jobs.
Building an online marketplace to unite them made perfect sense.
However, we had next to no experience and little knowledge of the publishing industry. So our
first move to validate the idea was to talk to as many authors, editors, agents, publishers, and
“industry experts” as we could. Connecting with these people through a half-formed idea was
actually easier than we thought: since we didn’t have anything to “sell” them, they were very
open to discussing our idea and helping us shape it.
Several of them have since become good friends and even power users of the Reedsy
Marketplace. Indeed, one of the key learning points from our early conversations was that for
our Marketplace to be successful, we needed to rigorously curate it, i.e. only allow the cream of
the crop in terms of freelancers.
Around the same time, we started building our core team and brought on two other co-
founders: an amazing designer, Matt, and an equally amazing CTO, Vincent. We were lucky
enough to find them simply by scouring the Internet and posting on forums. Most of us were
still in university at the time, so we were pretty much broke — which is why our next step was
to look for funding to build an MVP.
Since we didn’t really have the resources to do more on our own, we began by building a simple
landing page explaining the idea, along with a signup form to record interest. This allowed us to
build a small list of 2,000 people to leverage for fundraising.
A pivotal moment in our early days was when we managed to secure pre-seed funding through
Seedcamp. This was probably the best decision/achievement ever for us in terms of funding, as
their mentorship and network of investors paved the way for our future seed round.
This mini-round allowed Emmanuel, Matt, and I to move to a London flat and start working (and
living) together. We were also able to release an MVP that would generate enough traction for
us to raise a proper seed round. This period was obviously super intense, but equally exciting
and ultimately invaluable to us building and releasing a beautiful, fully operative marketplace in
just six months.
We didn’t know much about marketing back then, so there are now many things about our
initial launch that I’d do differently in terms of lead acquisition. But from a product perspective,
we launched in several solid stages:

 First, we released a very simple version of the website, meant exclusively for freelancers
to fill in their profiles. This was a way for us to grow the supply side of our marketplace
before opening it to the demand (authors);

 A month later, we released the marketplace itself, opening it to authors and allowing
them to message the freelancers they were interested in — but without the in-built
payment or collaboration tools, meaning we didn’t make any money yet;
 Finally, a couple of months later, we released the quoting, collaboration, and payment
interfaces, and started seeing our first projects on the platform.
This multi-stage launch somewhat diluted the PR and buzz we could have gotten with a single
launch, but it allowed us to improve quickly and make sure everything we released was working
properly.
It took us a few years to really nail customer acquisition and growth on the author side. I think
our biggest missed opportunity was not thinking about SEO on the Reedsy blog until a year or
two after we’d started it. We were effectively wasting time and money producing blog posts
that very few people would read, despite us (in retrospect, a bit spammily) sharing them in a
bunch of Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn groups.
At some point, we came across a great blog post about skyscraper SEO, and we decided to try
it. Since we’d already had a bunch of quotes go through our system, we made our data public in
a post on “how much does it cost to self-publish a book?”. We built a bunch of backlinks to it
through sharing an infographic, manual outreach, and guest posting, and quickly saw it rise to
the top 3 for most of its target keywords.
We repeated the operation with several other topics, observed great success, and eventually
concluded that every single post on the Reedsy blog should be for SEO purposes. To organize
our efforts, I built a mammoth keyword research spreadsheet listing every single topic we could
cover, and ordered it by “traffic/competition” score — allowing us to immediately target “low-
hanging fruit” keywords.

SEO is definitely the main channel responsible for our growth now, though affiliate marketing,
paid SEM, and display retargeting also play important roles. Once you have the kind of traffic
we get, running retargeting ads is both cheap and effective.
Right now, the company is profitable. We’ve experienced huge growth during 2020 — the
result of both our own efforts and the global pandemic and lockdowns, which have driven many
people to start writing again and invest in their books.
In 2020, the number of quote requests (our North Star metric) on the Marketplace has grown
over 65% from 2019, and signups have grown over 140%:
Of course, with the growth in terms of demand, we’ve had to work equally hard on growing our
supply — our network of vetted freelancers. We now have over 1,500 verified freelancers on
Reedsy (handpicked out of over 50,000 applicants).
The great thing about a marketplace is that you can keep adding services and segments, as long
as they’re relevant. Over the past two years, we’ve added author website designers and literary
translators, and are now working on adding audiobook narrators and editors/masterers.
We learn something new pretty much every week! But if I had to highlight a few key personal
learning points from my experience at Reedsy:
You want a web designer among your founders.
You want to meet people in person.
You don’t want to rely on third-party software.