Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?

I always thought of this idea in the city, there are lots of driving schools and perhaps taxi drivers that can drop packages off if the packages are not in a rush. That might be a start. Most common advice is that you have to be at least one of the sides somehow. Reddit famously did this with lots of sock puppet accounts to foster discussions and create pseudo activity.In your case, I'd probably start by reaching out to businesses in mid-size metro markets, ones where bike couriers don't already exist, and offer to save them on shipping small packages. Build up a list of clientele and encourage them to contact you for jobs when they need to ship small ad-hoc stuff. That should give you an idea of demand. Then start posting on craigslist and facebook looking for delivery drivers, then start match-making. From there encourage the drivers you find to sign up on your platform for future work. Yes, we called API - Actual Person Interface. One person on one side of the marketplace that does the heavy work to build the other side, kickstart the flywheel For advice let me use my current product. https://fontofweb.com is essentially Pinterest for web design. It does semantic search against a database of UI screenshots and recordings.The problem with products like this is that for search to be useful, you need, well... data. And when your data is crowdsourced, you need, well... a crowd. That was the chicken-and-egg situation I found myself in.So the way I solved it was by painstakingly clipping and recording ~8500 websites myself.But the great thing about that arduous process is that it forces you to put yourself in the shoes of your typical user. And really, the only way to make good products is to have a deep level of empathy for that user. In my case, that meant streamlining the data creation process itself, the act of pinning a screenshot or recording, because I had to do it over and over again. Making it easier for myself ended up making it better for everyone else too.Of course, all that data-seeding effort goes to waste if search engines and potential users cannot discover it. So you have to go all in on SEO, especially sitemaps, and on programmatic socials where possible. This is especially true for a product like mine.

A lot of these marketplaces also have relatively homogenous data, which is actually useful, because it means you can present it through templates and publish pages at scale automatically. My bigger question is how you would validate this isn't drugs because this seems like the perfect low effort way to send high value drugs. Relevant Mitch Hedberg (rest in peace) joke: “ I love my fed-ex guy cause he's a drug dealer and he doesn't even know it” Check-in explicitly asks you "have you packed your bags yourself", and then you have to either say "no I have this random package from a stranger which might contain anything" or lie to customs.TBH, I can't really think of a market for this that isn't contraband. The "last mile" looks really annoying as well.Edit: I think it's a legit marketing question for OP. Name three different kinds of item someone might want to use this service for.I'll even give you one: there's already a small cottage industry of reshipping companies from e.g. Japan, who will let you buy stuff from companies that won't themselves do international shipping. Ship to re-shipper, who then handles the international part.You might be able to get a market started if your model starts with only items bought from legitimate retailers. Effectively a really long distance doordash. I can easily imagine a market for this, because I was in the market for this until last week.I had a large, bulky, and fragile package I needed to send to Florida from New Jersey. The shipping corps were happy to do it for me for $500+, and no guarantee that it wouldn't arrive as a box of shattered glass.I ended up finding someone in town who happened to be driving there, and was kind enough to deliver it for me. They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this! > They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!Sure, but like open source, the dynamics are different when it's a favor without money changing hands. OP's market would want compensation, and then inevitably someone has to deal with the "my package arrived as a pile of shattered glass" claims. It's a thing in second world countries too.

There are small communities that don't get package delivery, so they ship packages to the capital city and then pay someone to drive packages to their community once a week or so. I've heard of people paying $50 a package in places with pretty low incomes. fair question. BlaBlaCar, Uber, Airbnb all got the same pushback: why would you get in a strangers car, sleep in a strangers house. Trust infrastructure solves it over time: ID verification, package limits, photo documentation, escrow paymnts.And people already do this informally all the time. Sending stuff "with someone who's traveling" is super common, it just happens with zero oversight right now. This adds structure and accountability to something that already exists I note that both Airbnb and Uber marketed as "use part of something you're not otherwise using", and almost immediately became professionalized. Full time drivers. People buying apartments to let out.Maybe they wouldn't have worked without that professionalization? Which is of course not possible if you're going the "passing traveller" model. Maybe worked but at very small scale. The early Lyft with fist bumps and much more casual driver interactions worked at some level but was pretty small--and I actively avoided because of the vibe. You may borrow a tool from a neighbor but it's not a routine or neighborhood-wide thing for the most part. I think you are being too glib. The trust model is really different for small packages. Housing small amounts of drugs in objects is way easier and more likely than wrecking someone's airbnb.And the consequences are higher for the driver. You can insure an airbnb or trip. Are you going to pay for someone's legal fees when they get popped for being a drug mule? Uber and Airbnb had budgets to subsidize the first mass of people. Heck, I’m less than nobody and got paid the first several times I used an Uber. All humor and pithy quips aside. The assumed liability is very different. A driver of a commercial courier accidentally transporting an illegal substance is at much less personal risk than an average citizen or small business.I think this match-maker platform should be willing to shoulder more that liability.

KYC but for bill of lading as well?While not 1-1 or perfect, AirBnb and TaskRabbit platforms include insurance and other risk mitigations for both sides of p2p relationship. You think the average person has the infrastructure and the relationship with customs and the DEA that FedEx and ups do? Yes because if someone gets stopped carrying contraband who works for FedEx, delivering in a FedEx truck, wearing a FedEx uniform is going to be treated the same as Bob in his Honda Civic who said he picked up a package from a known trap house and had no idea what was in it. You need to cheat to kickstart one side1) 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. 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! This. Stated another way, you need to start by either: fulfilling existing demand yourself....or being the demand yourself. 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 upoption 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 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. A recent episode of [David Senra's podcast with Tony Xu](https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/tony-xu), founder of DoorDash has some interesting points on this topic. Essentially there, they restricted the service to one locality, and he and his co-founders were the first drivers. Once demand was proven and slowly scaled, there was an incentive for other drivers to join, and with more drivers it opened up a wider geography. I suspect this is the best option. Focus on one city pair to start with, _you_ are the courier and find customers on that city pair. Then you can start figuring out how to attract people onto that city pair so you don't have to do it anymore (as there will be demand). How is this different from Uship? I've used that service and it's pretty good and reasonably priced. They do exactly what you talk about which is allow people to ship things between cities for a pretty reasonable price. You can either specify a price or have shipper bid on it, along with flexibility as to when it gets shipped. People end up being small-time shippers and will buy vans and then just deliver in between cities for as many parcels as they can ship. Volunteered, perhaps uselessly, without experience making a P2P market (so skip if you only want experience from actual doers):Same as always, you need market-making: you do it or get someone else to do it. i.e. place resting orders that others will do. e.g. in your case, maybe there is a demand for one specific kind of item: let me say GPUs.