Creating a marketplace.

Creating a marketplace is a classic “chicken and egg” problem. Who should appear first – a bunch of sellers with products and then buyers come? Or a bunch of buyers who want to spend their money and then sellers?

If you dig deeper, you will discover that marketplaces do not have this problem – there is always one of the parties, the “driver”, that successful growth depends on. 

With transportation services (taxi, ridesharing, trucking) – it’s the drivers. If there will be many drivers, there will be a choice of routes, and there will be short waiting times, so there will be clients. With commodity marketplaces, the drivers are customers. Sellers are ready to come to any place where there are buyers, but buyers are not prepared to go anywhere where there are goods.

Usually it’s the “driver” that is hardest to attract. Therefore, do not be fooled if you landed a dozen sellers to your new marketplace, now you have to find the money to attract traffic. As soon as you succeeded in inviting people to your marketplace check. This is probably not a growth driver. In that case, you need to change the focus to the other side.