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MenuHow to grow a two-sided P2P marketplace?
Best strategy to bring people quickly and use effectively your money.
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First you'll need the 'sellers'.
To get them to sign up you'll first need a website set up that looks professionally made to the extent that one could conceivably believe that it would attract 'buyers' to use its services.
Then, do research on how best to find sellers that would be appropriate for your site. You'll have to do grunt work to reach out to them individually at first. For instance maybe you're looking for experts on certain topics, you could check out slideshare.net and find the most popular decks on relevant topics, and then reach out to those authors. Or maybe you check out Linkedin or Quora and find the right people there. Help them with the sign up process as much as possible, and give them some extra early-sign up incentive, like maybe say that you'll feature all early sign ups at the top of the website for 1 week after you go live, or maybe you'll actively email market for them for several days each.
Once you've gotten sellers to populate the site, start advertising to buyers. Give the sellers easy ways to do advertisement too. For instance give them text and/or photos for social media posts, etc. If you onboarded some already-popular people as sellers, they will be able to help a lot in terms of generating their own traffic.
Although eventually P2P marketplaces can be somewhat self-perpetuating, initially you'll have to do a lot of manual work behind the scenes to get everything going.
best of luck,
Lee
Check out this free site for tips on growing a two-sided marketplace - https://www.sharetribe.com/academy/
This almost always effectively comes down to contact database abuse.
Linkedin Grew and got a 10M USD fine after importing addressbooks of users and inviting a ton of people to the platform.
Ebay and Paypal had interplay requirements.
Airbnb abused craigslist bots in the early days.
There's always platform abuse to grow a P2P marketplace.
Related Questions
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When creating a marketplace, does it make more sense to focus on stimulating demand first or supply?
Focus on the more difficult side of the marketplace. For instance, if you think it'll be easier to get suppliers, then focus first on getting buyers - always be working on your toughest problem (aka your biggest risk). You'll find some great blogging on Marketplace and Platform topics here http://platformed.info (read the ebook too!)CM
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My business offers two different types of services. Should I combine them in one webpage, or create two?
Two key concerns are 1. Customer confusion with the 2 offerings: Imagine being in an art gallery that sells photography training and fine art or a book store that tries to sell you fine art. Even if it's the same group of people, they may be in very different mind-sets and hence may not associate both together. 2. SEO challenges with mixed messages you're sending. Which keywords would you optimize for which part of the site? Advantage would be if the customer base is the same group of people, hence offering cross-sell opportunities. For instance, if your MAIN source of leads for the training site is the art site, then this would be more important. In general, I would suggest one site for one customer group. If there is likely to be a very high overlap, then same site, with multiple sub-sites might work. In matter of fact, it'll probably be EASIER to do two sites for this than one site. Your designer will thank you :) Then tastefully add cross-links in the places where someone is likely to use them. For instance the art gallery could have a post 'How I make art' and links to your other business there. And the photog training site would have your art pics with subtle on-image links to your art biz. While I'm not a branding expert, I do find that my engineering lead approach to challenges in Marketing/Sales usually works, and provides clarity and direction.PK
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Broad niche or Targeted niche which way to go?
I always suggest going "uncomfortably narrow" initially so that you can really dial in the user experience and build liquidity first. Going broad will be tougher as there's too much noise to signal. Also, it's best to fake the supply side initially of you can to improve the buyers side first, then figure out supply & quality afterwards if customers are buying and you've proven out a demand strategy that will work.DM
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Holding funds in a 2-sided marketplace?
Check out https://www.balancedpayments.com/ They are made for marketplaces. Airbnb CEO among others invested in them and they have some of the best pricing/payout fees. Also some good info on http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/2013/10/08/online-marketplaces-are-hard/ One of Balanced Payments co-founders is writing this blog series on marketplaces.MA
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What is the best pricing (business model) to apply to a marketplace?
I like to separate your question into 2 sub-questions: #1 How do we determine which side to charge? #2 How much is the right amount to charge? On #1, my answer is that you can charge the side(s) for whom you add the most value. In your examples, Uber really solves a big problem for drivers, it's that they sit idle for a good part of the day, so are willing to pay a lot for new leads. (their alternative is no work) Consumers are charged more for the convenience of a private car but they are probably not so much willing to pay more for a taxi, even if they can hail one from their phones. For AirBnB, it's a mix, it's a way for landlords to monetize idle capacity which they are willing to pay for, but it's also a way for a renter to pay less than they would normally pay for a hotel. On #2 (how much), I like to triangulate a number of factors: - What's the maximum amount I can charge one side, while still being a good deal for them. - How much do I need to charge so that I can become profitable? (the economics are quite different if you charge 3% vs. 12%) - What are comparable services charging for substitutes/competitive offerings? I will just add that there is no formulaic way to determine pricing strategies (curated vs. open), and it's a lot more about what's the comparable and what the value delivered is. That's how I approached the question while deciding the business model at ProBueno.com (my startup)MR
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