Article · 20 min read

19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace

James Currier · NFX Free Advanced

Nineteen concrete launch moves, drawn from NFX advising sixty plus marketplace startups, rather than another abstract essay about network effects. The tactics about constraining geography and time and about manually fulfilling early orders are exactly the unscalable work most marketplace founders try to skip.

  • Build the hard side first; the other side then gets 2 to 10x easier. Outdoorsy saw demand come 5x faster.
  • Start absurdly niche: eBay with Beanie Babies, Craigslist as a mail list to Craig's friends.
  • Subsidize one side: Uber paid drivers in key cities, ClassPass paid gyms cash upfront.
  • Square worked because only merchants changed behaviour, buyers used their cards as usual.
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The question it answers

  1. We are a marketplace, not a software product. What actually changes about GTM?

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