How did you fill up your marketplace?
The question of all questions :) How did you get your first few users for your marketplace? Let's collect our ideas.
For MentorCruise.com, I did:
- Approach people w/ a following to join as mentor
- Invested a lot into blogging content
- Connected w/ communities
- Shared milestones along the way
How about you?
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This is sick advice. Just an off topic question- how did you build MentorCruise?
For hired.com we started with an event instead of a full-blown marketplace... a single developer auction.
We had some connections with YCombinator so I think that was where a lot of the first clients (demand side) came from. There was no down side to participating in the auction since you only had to pay if you actually hired someone.
We actually started with the supply side though --> direct emailed a lot of developers based on their email addresses and asked them to sign up. I think this worked in our case because recruiting is SO painful.
I’m a month in on starting my marketplace dedicated to a trading card game.
I’ve been posting constantly on the community Facebook groups and provided eBay store conversions.
I would load all of their eBay items to the marketplace for them.
I’ve come to realize that creating sales posts (starting with supply) might not be the greatest approach so now I’m working on creating demand on the marketplace.
Letting users make collections of things they want instead of what they want to sell.