
Ask HN: Initial user traction for two-sided market platforms? - quotz
How can you get initial users for platforms that involve two userbases? Platforms such as Amazon, Medium, etc?
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ismail
First figure out which side is harder to attract. Demand side or supply side?
In most cases the demand side is harder as you could easily get
people/companies who want more $. This however does not hold in every market.

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.

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siquick
Which vertical are you working in?

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.

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dvt
Cheat. Like pg would say, "do stuff that doesn't scale" \-- this means:

\- 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.

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PaulHoule
Look at the line "shoot the hostage" in the first scene of this movie:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_(1994_film)](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.

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taprun
Can you add a secondary source of value that will attract one of the parties
first?

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ecesena
I think the rule of thumbs is to focus more on the producers, to have a
quality market. This will appeal to consumers and will keep them coming back.

