Ask HN: Initial user traction for two-sided market platforms?
How can you get initial users for platforms that involve two userbases? Platforms such as Amazon, Medium, etc?
I am going to use the term the marketplace driver for this. Not sure if it already exists.
The market place driver will make the platform attractive for the other side.
A strategy for this could be to intially offer something of value to the marketplace driver without the need for the other side. So they get value without having to conclude a transaction.
Then eventually transition to the marketplace business model.
Another tip would be to focus. like around a geographic location, product or niche service. Then expand out from there.
In 99% of cases you're going to need to seed the initial content/products/services.
- The two Reddit founders created thousands of accounts and posted all the content, this gives the idea of 'busyness'
- The Paypal founders made a ton of eBay listings themselves and set Paypal as the payment method, to increase awareness.
- Airbnb seeded their initial content by posting listings of the properties on Craigslist and included a link back to Airbnb.
But just throwing money and/or resources at a problem doesn't prove that you're actually creating a sustainable business solving a real-world problem that people have.
- Paying for quality content. If you're starting a blogging platform (e.g. Medium) and no one is reading it, you need to get some high quality content on there. Pay some top bloggers or people with social followings to write something on your site.
- Paying for traffic. If you built a cool social platform, you can "force" going viral on reddit, twitter, etc. by buying upvotes & retweets. If the content is high quality, the content will organically blow up after the artificial "push."
- Offer crazy incentives. Say you're building an Amazon competitor. Do crazy stuff like "if your product doesn't sell in 14 days, we'll buy it for you!" Obviously, this can't scale, but when first starting out, it can be a useful strategy.
Whatever you do, you're going to be burning cash. There's no way around it, barring unicorn cases like Snapchat and Instagram.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_(1994_film)
basically you have to find some cheat to cover one of the sides. Almost all of the successful community sites that I know of involved some kind of aggressive promotion at the beginning, enough that some people would have ethical concerns.