

Advice on getting buyers and sellers together - zaidtillman

It is hard enough to sell products to people directly, but it is harder to if you need to sell to two parties for the product to work.<p>For eg. Ebay had to work to get people together - How did they get over the catch 22 situation in the beginning (seller does not go there, because there are no buyers and vice-versa)<p>There are plenty of other non-tech examples too - like VISA.. How did they get customers to get these credit cards when no company supported them in the beginning?
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byoung2
A site like Ebay can be interesting in the beginning with just a handful of
sellers. Back then there were no auction websites, so the novelty alone would
attract sellers, and the buyers would follow. If you were starting that site
from scratch today, you could start with a few dozen friends and family, and
maybe a few dozen more beta testers/early adopters. 50 people selling a
handful of items each and you have a few hundred products to attract buyers.

Visa is an interesting example because they started out as BofA Bankamericard,
so they had the backing of a large bank, who could get retailers on board.
They got thousands of merchants to accept it, and then just gave away cards
unsolicited. It is unlikely that you could achieve this with a startup because
you won't have $20 million (of 1958 money) to spend. If you were a startup
wanting to do something similar, you would have to form partnerships with a
few merchants, and then pitch to their customers.

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zaidtillman
Thanks. Though it seems that you have twice the opportunity to sell, but it is
really twice as hard?

Isn't the used book business model come under criticism because of this - I
remember reading that it is a bad idea. Any thoughts on this?

