You need to cheat to kickstart one side

1) Incentivize people on one side to join without the other side. For example Uber paid early drivers money just for signing up even though they had no riders.

2) You provide one side of the marketplace to kickstart the other side. This would be like Uber hiring drivers in the beginning.

This is why starting a two sided marketplace often requires significant capital. They're very hard to start organically.

Another thing I'd suggest is to focus on a niche. Don't try to solve the global problem just yet. Maybe you know a lot of people want to transport books between London and Madrid. Just focus on that to get that market healthy, then add another product or location. This helps you focus your marketing. Also if you go global to start you might have 1000 users on both sides but no matches because everyone is too spread out.

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mohsen1 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Uber also paid riders to ride. I was working for Garret Camp at SumbleUpon and we got free Uber Black back then. The number of available drivers even in SF was so low that it was not really useful, even free!

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TheGRS 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IIRC Uber employees would jump into taxis and offer them money on the spot to drive for them.

Its priming the pump, I agree there's probably no way around it. Once you get some adoption you can use that experience to go to other cities. Hit social networks often to generate interest organically.

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alegd 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah the "cheat" framing makes sense. I've been thinking about option 2, being the supply side myself at the start. Like personally coordinating the first few deliveries to prove it works before asking random travelers to sign up

option 1 is trickier when bootstrapped though. How do you incentivize signups without burning money you dont have? Curious if you've seen that work without VC funding behind it

	▲	Eridrus 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The only real example I can think of being bootstrapped is Airbnb, and even that wasn't bootstrapped for long. Unless you have a good go to market strategy, you might want to try something easier. At the risk of being overly critical, the cost of shipping packages is pretty low unless you're trying to do same day delivery, in which case Uber already lets you get your package delivered.
	▲	leros 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Without burning money you'll need to be creative. Either do it yourself or go sourcing the supply side. Can you go find a group of people you can use to transport things and basically sign up on the platform on their behalf and then hand stuff off to them? Maybe you know some travel group that exist and you could pay them to take packages. You're basically acting in an agency model in the beginning instead of being a true P2P marketplace. It's a common strategy though it does often lead to just becoming an agency because it's more successful than your organic marketplace. This would be like if you called an Uber and Uber calls up a private driving service to pick you up.

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garrickvanburen 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This. Stated another way, you need to start by either: fulfilling existing demand yourself....or being the demand yourself.

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sharnett 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Interview with Lugg (YC S15) with some details on how they did it: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/interview-with-lugg-founder...

	▲	alegd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for your reply! This will help me a lot.