Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?

I'd start with a slow rollout to friends, family, colleagues and even LinkedIn acquittances. You'd be surprised how many people are super eager to be the first to test your apps, even with a generic cold message like "hey, remember me? I built this cool app, wanna try it out if you have a minutes? I'll send you money to cover the fees."

In your case, I'd probably start by reaching out to businesses in mid-size metro markets, ones where bike couriers don't already exist, and offer to save them on shipping small packages. Build up a list of clientele and encourage them to contact you for jobs when they need to ship small ad-hoc stuff. That should give you an idea of demand. Then start posting on craigslist and facebook looking for delivery drivers, then start match-making. From there encourage the drivers you find to sign up on your platform for future work.

1) Incentivize people on one side to join without the other side. For example Uber paid early drivers money just for signing up even though they had no riders.

2) You provide one side of the marketplace to kickstart the other side. This would be like Uber hiring drivers in the beginning.

This is why starting a two sided marketplace often requires significant capital. They're very hard to start organically.

Another thing I'd suggest is to focus on a niche. Don't try to solve the global problem just yet. Maybe you know a lot of people want to transport books between London and Madrid. Just focus on that to get that market healthy, then add another product or location. This helps you focus your marketing. Also if you go global to start you might have 1000 users on both sides but no matches because everyone is too spread out.

in two words, two sided networks usually have a "hard part". in the case of uber, the drivers. in your case, i'd probably "do things that don't scale" like brian chesky did with airbnb, start with a super small location (probably where you live) and drive yourself / your cofounders / friends all the packages until people know the product works.

usually, with cold start products, you have to solve it many times in many locations. you can't do it worldwide day one.

Honestly, just be the courier. Pick one route, find the senders manually, and drive the packages yourself.

Roadie. https://www.roadie.com/

The problem with products like this is that for search to be useful, you need, well... data. And when your data is crowdsourced, you need, well... a crowd. That was the chicken-and-egg situation I found myself in.

So the way I solved it was by painstakingly clipping and recording ~8500 websites myself.

But the great thing about that arduous process is that it forces you to put yourself in the shoes of your typical user. And really, the only way to make good products is to have a deep level of empathy for that user. In my case, that meant streamlining the data creation process itself, the act of pinning a screenshot or recording, because I had to do it over and over again. Making it easier for myself ended up making it better for everyone else too.

Of course, all that data-seeding effort goes to waste if search engines and potential users cannot discover it. So you have to go all in on SEO, especially sitemaps, and on programmatic socials where possible. This is especially true for a product like mine.

A lot of these marketplaces also have relatively homogenous data, which is actually useful, because it means you can present it through templates and publish pages at scale automatically.

That means either being the traveler and carrying things for others. Or be the demand and start shipping things this way and get some other people to carry packages for you.

Same as always, you need market-making: you do it or get someone else to do it. i.e. place resting orders that others will do. e.g. in your case, maybe there is a demand for one specific kind of item: let me say GPUs. Then you be customer number one of your thing, you buy GPUs in one place and have people move them to the other place in their checked bags or whatever. Alternatively, you make the other side of the market that is highly heterogeneous (say, Indian sweets) and you or your family fly between the two locations yourself. It might teach you about the time preference of your clientele etc.

Anyway, it would seem that ultimately all markets need market-makers to bootstrap.

This being said, your idea is not new https://www.traveltechnation.com/companies/piggybee

In this case I think you'd basically have to pay the drivers to make deliveries for yourself, and then work to show the value of this service to those whom need this service and are in a position to take over paying for it.

You should already know what your largest city-to-city routes might be at this point, so why not focus on economy of scale there? If you need to rent a cube van to make it happen, do that.

Fake it until you make it baby!

That being said, there is a long-established business for this kind of thing for companies, not individuals, that goes back decades. Here are two examples:

1. 30+ years ago companies would give discounted tickets to people with the condition that they couldn't take any luggage. Why? Because the company would use their luggage allowance to send stuff. I believe it was mostly documents. Discounting an airfare by $500-1000 to send 50-80lb of documents was actually a good deal. I don't know how the logistics worked of baggage drop off and pick up but I believe it was relatively understood that the passenger wasn't responsible for the luggage. I assume the shippers had some kind of commercial relationship with the airline and handled all the customs declarations, import duties, etc;

2. There are times when businesses need to get certain parts or materials in a very time-sensitive manner. For example, I knew someone who worked in oil and gas. An oil platform had shut down production and needed a replacement drill part or something, I forget, and it was over Christmas. They could've ordered it. It would get sent and then sit in a customs warehouse until it gets cleared. That could take days or even a week or more. Not having it was costing half a million dollars a day. So what did they do? They flew someone across the Atlantic to the US to get the parts, pay exorbitant extra baggage fees (it was large) and come back with it. Why? Because passenger baggage would immediately pass through customs at the airport. This would likely save 5-10 days.

So there are some obvious questions to be asked here like:

- How do you make this safe and legal?

- Why isn't this just being Fedexed? Fedex is your cap on fees too;

- How does someone pick this up and drop it off?

- What if they get charged customs fees? How is that recouped?

- Who fills out customs forms?

- What about transiting countries? You may run into issues where something is legal in the source and destination countries but you transit somewhere where it isn't.

I don't know how you bootstrap this because you're going to be dealing with people who have way more experience than you at shiping thing sinternationally. More importantly, they'll have much more volume. That means they can send things via courier at rates you can't dream of getting. So how do you compete with that?

Even in the example mentioned above, the company used an employee to go pick it up. It was an expensive part so an employee could be trusted more than some random could.

Ditch this idea and instead build a Sales Enablement B2B Saas targeted at other YC companies, fuel the pyramid scheme by selling contracts back and forth between your other VC funded B2B Saas company friends and exit before the hype around you dies down.

Bootstrapping a two sided marketplace in 2026 is virtually impossible, especially one as esoteric and low value as what you’ve described.

- you're on HN, so you have an opportunity to tell us the name of the thing - marketing

- perhaps consider your marketing budget to be the area you need to invest in now, and indirectly how that budget can actually generate a little revenue and exercise the engine - e.g. do you have packages you can ship through your service to announce it to others? Use your marketing budget to do it and collect your marketplace fees - marketing again. Nothing says I believe in my product like using it for real (IMHO).

- a bold and risky move (?) - most would say fake it till you make it - but I for one tire of this tactic. How about approaching this with honesty and reward the first adopters? "We're brand new but you can be the first to help us prove out this model?".

- your marketplace is a network. Search for an opening that has viral properties. Try to tap into something that has a network effect, go to where your customer is and see how you can target/advertise strategically and respectfully - become a trusted partner to one or more communities (e.g. thinking out loud, eBay sellers maybe?). This could include finding the right partner(s) who have a problem and are willing to give you a shot in an existing network.

On the last point - as an example of the viral thing - I worked on a real estate tool a while back. We found a viral hook - there were for sure properties that needed to be processed and worked through the tool - we email invited the parties involved in the transaction to invite them to work on the property in the secure tool, and we gave them the ability to invite others working the same transaction to the tool, and we focused everything on polishing that workflow and experience.

This way, as soon as one person used the tool they could invite others to use it legitimately to work in the tool and that was the viral aspect.

This points to, replace real estate tool and house with "package" and invite... and can you achieve something viral that spreads itself... like, when someone ships with your tool, it emails the recipient with the link to your site for status tracking and a call to action to make them want to ship using your platform.

This to me is a lot of marketing and product strategy around incentivizing the network effect.

Disclaimer: I never made millions of dollars off a marketplace. But I did help stand up the real estate mechanism I mentioned and that business reliably brought in 5-10 grand a month with no marketing effort and just that one mechanism, and it also helped us find a few key network partners. That's what drives my feedback.