Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

This is a classic two sided market. People who need money and are willing to sell services don’t know who you are. And people who are willing to buy services don’t know who you are. And the platform is useless unless you have both of those.

The trick here is to find a very specific niche to start with. Instead of the goal being “let me get this popular everywhere” your short term goal should be to find how to make it popular among a single existing community. Churches, mosques and synagogues are a good place to start. People in those groups already like to support each other and virtually all of them have one or more internal WhatsApp or Facebook groups where people who start a campaign can advertise to others in their community.

Also people who have skills that would be best for such platform in marketing terms (stuff really in high demand) are actually front loaded with work so they don’t have need for yet another platform.

My friend thought about something similar in our country - but I told him first he would have to have good plumbers/mechanics available and available exclusively so that if you hire via that page it is actually useful for the customer.

What I have seen was that my insurance has „repair man” service as bonus and when I called them I had someone fixing my stuff in 2 days. Where if I was calling around every professional was busy and could get to me in like a month.

If you have low demand skills like „making web pages” you are not getting traction with such site and you have to burn investors money to keep in demand pros on bench and most likely it will be years to become profitable.

Hope someone find it interesting as it was a lot of writing :)

Feels like Mormons might be a good group to go after. They seem like they have more of an in group vibe than other contemporary sects, and in-groupier groups probably help one another more freely and more often. Their stories are kooky but I think they aren’t anti tech at all. Localized to specific areas as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com