First Customers (GTM)

I run a two-sided marketplace. Do I get my first customers by starting with supply or demand, and how do I avoid the empty-restaurant problem?

A starting point

Marketplaces die empty on both sides, so pick the side that is easier to bootstrap manually and fake the other until it is real, which usually means recruiting supply by hand and even standing in for demand yourself early on. Constrain hard to one city, one category, or one campus so both sides feel like a full room, not a ghost town. Do things that don't scale here literally: personally onboard every early seller and hand-match the first buyers so no one's first experience is emptiness.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 2 link-checked

Read

✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it For a two-sided marketplace, the first real decision is which side to define and win first, and this essay makes the case plainly: figure out which side is harder to get, because that side is usually the more valuable one, and once you have it the other side gets 2 to 10 times easier. It then walks through concrete ways to seed that harder side without the other side existing yet, so it is a starting point for the pick-two problem rather than abstract theory. NFX has studied more marketplace network-effect businesses than almost anyone, which is why this is the canonical reference founders keep returning to.

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

From NFX by James Currier Long read (about 25 minutes)

  • Identify the constrained (harder to acquire) side first, and define your ideal customer there, because that side sets the pace for the whole marketplace.
  • You can build standalone value for one side before the other exists (for example a tool suppliers use whether or not buyers are present) so you are not stuck waiting for both.
  • There are many concrete seeding levers (subsidies, geographic or category constraints, manual matching), so pick the two or three that fit your niche instead of trying all of them.
Open nfx.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the tactical playbook for actually doing what the framing essays recommend: pick one city and one vertical, then hand-build your first suppliers yourself. It is honest that early liquidity comes from unglamorous manual work, sitting with your first providers and onboarding them one by one, not from launching broad. For a founder building outside the big startup hubs, the single-city constraint is a real advantage, because your home city is a market you already understand and can walk around in.

Focus your marketplace on one city and one vertical

From Sharetribe Marketplace Academy by Juho Makkonen (Sharetribe) Article, roughly 12 to 15 minutes

  • Constrain hard: one city and one vertical beats a broad launch because density is what makes buyers reliably find what they came for.
  • Onboard your first suppliers by hand. Manual matching and curation are the point, not a shortcut you skip.
  • Narrow messaging ("rent a bike in Oxford") sets clear expectations and builds trust faster than a vague, everywhere pitch.
Open sharetribe.com →
📖 Book
Paid Advanced

Why we picked it The definitive playbook for network and community-led products, drawn from Andrew Chen's a16z experience and interviews with Slack, Uber, Tinder, Airbnb and more.

The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

From Harper Business by Andrew Chen Book (~368 pages)

  • Build the smallest self-sustaining 'atomic network' before trying to scale.
  • Focus on the hard side of the network and give it a magic moment.
  • Networks are anti-viral until they cross a density threshold, so start narrow.
Open coldstart.com →

People also ask

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