Every marketplace operator faces the same brutal question: do you invest in supply or demand? More restaurants or more hungry customers? More sellers or more buyers? The conventional wisdom says "it depends on your constraint." But that's useless advice when both sides are burning cash and screaming for resources.
What's striking is how much the best operators disagree on the answer. Some bet the farm on supply. Others chase Daily Active Users like their lives depend on it. A few have built businesses that flip the question entirely. Here's what 8 top growth leaders at Mercado Libre, Rappi, Cornershop, and Cameo actually said about where to put the chips—and why the most successful ones changed their minds halfway through.
The counterintuitive case: demand creates its own supply
Pablo Moretti, VP of Technology at Mercado Libre, makes a claim that would get you laughed out of most marketplace strategy meetings: the future isn't about grabbing more share of wallet. It's about stealing time.
Los asiáticos lo plantearon desde otro lado, desde el generar la demanda desde el entretenimiento. El contenido. Ahà donde aparece TikTok Shop, Temu, Shopee, donde buscan entretener al usuario para que use la plataforma todo el tiempo.
— Pablo Moretti, VP of Technology at Mercado Libre
Moretti distinguishes between planned demand (someone who searches for a TV and buys it) and unplanned demand (someone scrolling who didn't know they needed something until they saw it). Mercado Libre historically won on planned demand—better selection, better prices, faster delivery. But the Asian playbook flipped the script: if you can capture enough attention through entertainment and engagement, you generate demand that wouldn't otherwise exist.
This is more than theory. Moretti revealed that Mercado Libre now tracks Daily Active Users as a core metric, something they didn't prioritize even a few years ago. The logic: if users are in your app every day, they'll eventually buy things they never planned to buy. Demand, in other words, creates its own purchase occasions.
Joao Goncalves, who led growth at OLX and QuintoAndar, saw this play out in classifieds. At Bom Negócio (which later merged with OLX), the team ran over 60 TV commercials between 2011 and 2014—featuring Maradona, the "Compadre Washington," and Narcisa Tamborindeguy. The goal wasn't conversion. It was ubiquity.
Começamos a ter uma equipe também de CRM, email marketing, para todo o engajamento da base de usuários. A coerência do meio do funil, a coerência e articulação dessas peças todas é onde a coisa mais falha.
— Joao Goncalves, Fmr Head of Growth at QuintoAndar / OLX Brazil
Goncalves built a 25-person team focused on the entire funnel—brand at the top, CRM and email in the middle, performance at the bottom. The insight: most teams either do top-of-funnel branding or bottom-funnel conversion. The magic is in the middle, where engagement turns casual browsers into repeat buyers. That's where demand compounds.
When supply unlocks use cases that didn't exist
Paulo Rebolledo, SVP at Rappi, tells a different story. When Rappi launched Turbo—its quick commerce vertical for ultra-fast delivery—the constraint wasn't demand. People already wanted groceries. The constraint was supply: no one had built the dark store infrastructure to deliver in under an hour at scale.
Un año despuĂ©s, esto no es una exageraciĂłn, un año despuĂ©s Turbo estaba lanzado en 7 mercados. Es un use case unlocked que antes no existĂa.
— Paulo Rebolledo, SVP at Rappi (Colombia)
Rappi incubated Turbo inside its retail vertical, then scaled it to 7 markets in a year. The demand was latent—people would have loved 30-minute grocery delivery before Turbo existed—but the supply-side build (warehouses, inventory systems, hyper-local logistics) had to come first. Once the supply was there, the use case exploded.
Daniel Undurraga, co-founder of Cornershop (acquired by Uber), saw the same dynamic. Cornershop started as a grocery delivery marketplace, connecting shoppers to stores. But the real breakthrough came when they built their own supply: curated inventory, exclusive partnerships, and owned logistics.
Antes no existĂa. Y lo empezamos a estudiar y yo creo que nos demoramos una semana o algo asĂ en darnos cuenta: esto es lo que tenemos que hacer.
— Daniel Undurraga, Co-founder at CornerShop
Undurraga's team took a week to study the opportunity, then went all-in on building the supply side. Why? Because demand for grocery delivery was obvious. The hard part was assembling the selection, speed, and reliability that would make people switch from going to the store themselves. Once Cornershop unlocked that supply, demand followed.
The mercado libre playbook: supply drives share of wallet
Tomas Piuzzi, Head of Growth at Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago, frames the supply question differently. For Mercado Libre, the strategy has always been about expanding share of wallet: how much of a user's total spending can you capture?
Amazon crece a partir del comercio de share of wallet de los usuarios. TenĂas cuánto gasta en compras, Grocery, para supermercado, servicios, seguros, mĂ©dicos, farmas tambiĂ©n.
— Tomas Piuzzi, Head of Growth at Mercado Libre / Mercado Pago
Mercado Libre expanded from electronics into groceries, pharmacy, insurance, and financial services. Each new category required massive supply-side investment—onboarding sellers, building logistics, negotiating with suppliers. But the payoff was structural: once a user trusts Mercado Libre for one category, they're exponentially more likely to buy in another.
Piuzzi also described the company's planning process, which balances short-term execution (quarterly "porotos" or beans) with annual strategy retreats and 1-to-3-year roadmaps. At that scale, you can't just wing it. The supply-side bets—new categories, new geographies, new infrastructure—are locked in months or years in advance.
When the supply side implodes: the cameo warning
Laura Schaffer, VP of Growth at Amplitude (and formerly at Cameo), offers the cautionary tale. Cameo grew to $100 million in revenue during the pandemic by adding supply (celebrities with free time) and demand (people stuck at home with disposable income). Both sides of the marketplace went vertical at once.
The problem? Cameo confused a temporary supply-demand match for a sustainable growth loop. When the pandemic ended, both sides evaporated. Celebrities went back to work. Consumers went back to spending on experiences. Cameo had scaled supply (buying a talent agency, expanding to NFTs) without proving that the underlying demand was durable.
If you really have lightning in a bottle, you've got something effective. It tends to echo in a few different chambers, not just sort of one thing that's really moving.
— Laura Schaffer, VP of Growth at Amplitude
Schaffer's lesson: you know you've got something real when multiple signals are pushing it, not just one tailwind. Cameo had a single massive tailwind (pandemic boredom + celebrity availability), but no structural moat once that wind stopped blowing.
The brand performance paradox in marketplaces
Thiago Goularte, Director of Monetization at Rappi Brazil, introduces another wrinkle: in a marketplace, brand investment is supply investment. When Rappi builds brand awareness, it doesn't just drive more users to the app. It makes restaurants and retailers more willing to join the platform.
O mercado de marketing estava em si passando por transformações, os clientes exigindo coisas das agências, da própria Arizona e a Arizona precisava colocar tecnologia no processo como um todo.
— Thiago Goularte, Director de Monetizacion at Rappi Brazil
Goularte spent years in the ad-tech ecosystem before joining Rappi, and he saw how marketing was shifting from a pure creative function to a tech-enabled growth lever. At Rappi, brand campaigns don't just drive app downloads—they signal to supply partners (restaurants, stores, couriers) that Rappi is the dominant platform. That perception becomes self-fulfilling.
Fernando del Rio, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Talisis (and formerly at Mercado Libre and Linio), built his career on this insight. At Linio, he was hired to replicate what Mercado Libre had done: build a marketplace that could compete with the giants. His strategy? Go after supply aggressively, but use brand and performance marketing to create the perception of demand.
Tu competencia, por muy grande que sea, no puede atacar todo el mercado.
— Fernando del Rio, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Talisis (Mexico)
Del Rio's thesis: even a giant like Mercado Libre or Amazon can't serve every niche. If you can dominate a specific segment—either by geography, category, or customer type—you can build a defensible position. But you have to move fast on both supply and demand at once, which requires brutal prioritization.
Where the experts disagree: liquidity thresholds vs. continuous optimization
Here's where the battle lines are drawn. Some operators believe marketplaces have a liquidity threshold: a specific point where the network effect kicks in and growth becomes self-sustaining. Others think liquidity is a continuous optimization problem that never ends.
Rebolledo at Rappi falls into the first camp. When he was a city manager, the mandate was simple: grow 20% month-over-month, no matter what. That meant doing whatever it took to hit a liquidity threshold in each city—enough restaurants, enough users, enough couriers—where the marketplace could run on its own momentum.
Moretti at Mercado Libre represents the second camp. Even after 20+ years and 60+ million users, Mercado Libre is still investing heavily in both supply and demand. The difference is that at scale, the investments shift from blunt-force growth to sophisticated engagement: content, AI-driven recommendations, personalized CRM.
Goncalves splits the difference. At QuintoAndar, he joined when the company had 90 employees and left when it had 1,000. He built a 70-person growth team from scratch. His view: liquidity thresholds exist, but they're temporary. Once you hit one, you need to find the next unlock—new category, new geography, new product—or growth stalls.
The only framework that matters: where are you in the loop?
The cleanest answer comes from Undurraga at Cornershop. When deciding where to invest, ask: where are we in the growth loop? If supply is the constraint, add supply. If demand is the constraint, add demand. But most marketplaces aren't constrained by one or the other—they're constrained by matching.
Cornershop's growth wasn't about more users or more stores. It was about better matching: the right shopper, the right store, the right delivery window. That required investment in data infrastructure, algorithms, and operations—not traditional supply or demand marketing.
Piuzzi at Mercado Libre echoes this. At Mercado Pago, the growth team runs over 1,000 experiments at any given time. Some optimize supply (merchant acquisition, payment methods). Some optimize demand (user engagement, repeat purchase). But the biggest wins come from improving the core loop: faster checkout, better recommendations, seamless cross-sell from e-commerce to fintech.
The takeaway isn't "invest in supply" or "invest in demand." It's: understand your loop, find the constraint, and move resources there faster than your competitors. Then do it again next quarter.
The brutal truth: most marketplaces die from indecision, not wrong decisions
What kills marketplaces isn't picking the wrong side. It's splitting resources evenly and moving too slowly on both. Schaffer at Amplitude saw this at Cameo: instead of doubling down on either celebrity supply or fan demand, the company hedged. It bought a talent agency (supply bet) while also expanding into NFTs and new categories (demand bet). Neither worked because neither got full commitment.
Rebolledo at Rappi tells the opposite story. When Rappi launched Turbo, the company went all-in on supply: dark stores, inventory, logistics. Demand followed because the product was 10x better than any alternative. But that only worked because Rappi had the conviction—and the capital—to build the supply side at scale before proving demand.
Del Rio's experience at Linio reinforces the point. When he joined, Linio was a distant third or fourth in Mexican e-commerce. Within a year, the company was growing triple digits year-over-year. How? By making a clear bet: supply-side hunters (aggressive merchant acquisition) paired with demand-side farmers (retention, CRM, brand). No fence-sitting.
The framework that emerges from these 8 leaders is simple but hard to execute: pick a side, commit resources, measure like hell, and be ready to flip if the data says you're wrong. Marketplaces are won by operators who can make big bets and change them fast—not by those who hedge their way to mediocrity.