Imagine you're starting a farmers market in your local community. You've secured a great location and obtained the necessary permits. But there's one major hurdle – you need both farmers to sell their produce and customers to buy it. This classic "chicken and egg" dilemma plagues many entrepreneurs, especially those building online marketplaces.
According to a conversation between Brian Rothenberg (VP at Eventbrite) and Casey Winters (Growth Advisor at Greylock), the "chicken and egg problem" refers to the challenge of seeding supply and demand simultaneously when launching a new marketplace business. Just like your farmers market needs both vendors and shoppers, online platforms like Airbnb (accommodations), Uber (ridesharing), and Thumbtack (local services) require a critical mass of both suppliers and consumers to create a viable marketplace.
Without a robust supply of listings or services, there's little incentive for customers to use the platform. Conversely, if there's no existing demand, suppliers have no reason to participate. Solving this circular conundrum is crucial for getting a new marketplace off the ground.
One tactic is taking a "Trojan Horse" approach – offering a standalone product or service that's inherently valuable to potential suppliers, even before you've built up demand on the consumer side. This gets suppliers on board and kickstarts the supply side of your marketplace. For example, when starting out, the home services platform Thumbtack provided tools for professionals (like landscapers and plumbers) to manage their businesses. While not a full-fledged marketplace initially, it helped recruit a critical mass of service providers that Thumbtack could then expose to demand from consumers.
Another strategy is aggressively seeding your marketplace by creating skeletal listings yourself, then allowing real suppliers to claim and flesh out those placeholders. This approach provides the initial supply that can attract early consumer demand.Thumbtack actually employed this tactic when launching across 1,000 categories in the entire United States. The founders created basic listings for services like "wedding photographer in Seattle" that real photographers could then claim and complete with their details, photos, pricing, and so on.Leveraging offline marketing can also help bootstrap a new online marketplace. Ridesharing giants like Uber embraced tactics like branded vehicles and delivery bags to increase brand awareness and drive new user signups from the real world.
While measuring the direct impact is difficult, this offline presence reinforces an online marketplace's brand and perceived legitimacy. As Winters noted, seeing Uber's distinct vehicles everywhere helped convince people that "this is a real service that's happening on the streets."The farmers market analogy illustrates why solving the supply/demand challenge is so critical. If you opened your market with just a handful of farmers, there would be insufficient selection and inventory to attract shoppers. And if you only had a few curious visitors initially, farmers would be disappointed by the lack of customers and unlikely to keep participating.
Successful marketplaces like eBay, Airbnb, and Upwork gained powerful momentum by resolving this chicken-and-egg issue early on. Through a combination of aggressive user acquisition, incentives for early participants, and (often) raising a lot of capital to subsidize growth, they managed to catalyze a self-perpetuating cycle of supply and demand. Once a marketplace hits critical mass, the platform benefits from self-reinforcing network effects, where more suppliers attract more buyers, which in turn attracts even more suppliers. This virtuous loop propels continued expansion.
However, this same dynamic also tends to make marketplaces "winner-take-most" in a given category. With such powerful same-side and cross-side network effects, it becomes extremely difficult for new entrants to unseat an established leader like Craigslist. As Rothenberg and Winters discussed, a meaningfully superior product experience (like optimizing for mobile) may be required to dethrone an incumbent. So for entrepreneurs building the next great marketplace, prioritize strategies for achieving critical mass as quickly as possible.
Solve the chicken-and-egg problem of seeding supply and demand in those crucial early days. Leverage tactics like the Trojan Horse approach, aggressive user acquisition, and offline marketing to jumpstart your marketplace's growth. Because once you overcome that initial hurdle and set off a positive flywheel of network effects, there's no limit to how high your marketplace can soar!