From 0 to 100K Users Before Product-Market Fit

Mike's early growth playbook was tight: drive leads to a landing page via Meta ads (when CPL was under $1), then layer in a referral incentive — free booze on your party for referring a friend. The result was 50,000 waitlist signups and 100,000 users in three months. He's direct that this doesn't translate the same way today. His replacement thesis: stunts. Batch is currently planning a private jet giveaway for one lucky party that books through the platform. The lesson isn't just "do a giveaway" — it's that manufactured virality with a high perceived prize value can do what cheap CPL used to do at scale.

When rogue ads brought in 35,000 birthday party users in a single month, the immediate signal looked bad — marketplace conversion tanked because birthday parties don't book the same experiences as bachelorette groups. Most operators would kill the campaign and move on. Mike read it differently: we can acquire this audience if we build for them. That anomalous data directly triggered the rebrand from Bach to Batch. The takeaway for consumer marketers: anomalies in your funnel — the traffic sources that convert weird, the segments that bounce differently — often contain the most useful signal about where your next audience is hiding.

Viator has 400,000 listings and competes primarily through Google paid search. Mike's explicit read was: that's a war defined by who can burn more capital on CAC, not who builds the better product. His counter-move was to serve fewer suppliers but go significantly deeper — better storytelling on listings, tools that actually help experience operators run their businesses, a platform that becomes infrastructure rather than just a discovery layer. For consumer marketers, this is a useful framework: if the dominant players in your category are winning on volume and spend, depth and retention can be a more defensible moat than competing head-on for the same eyeballs.

For four years, Batch's experience-operator partners asked the same questions: how do I get content, how do I work with influencers, what marketing tools should I use, how do I find an accountant? Mike eventually stopped treating those as support tickets and started treating them as a product brief. The pivot to SaaS wasn't just a monetization decision — it was a response to accumulated qualitative signal from the supply side of the marketplace. Consumer founders who are running two-sided platforms should be mining the recurring pain points of their supply side just as aggressively as they're optimizing the demand side.

One underappreciated structural benefit of the marketplace-to-SaaS shift: every new supplier who pays a recurring fee also funds Batch's expansion into that market. Under a commission model, non-booked suppliers had no skin in the game — they just waited. The SaaS model aligned incentives: suppliers invest in the platform, Batch invests in the market. The result was expansion from ~40 cities to 100+ in roughly 18 months. For founders managing two-sided marketplaces, this is worth stress-testing: does your current monetization model create mutual investment in market growth, or does it let one side free-ride?