[exelius]

The hard part in building a two-sided market is getting users AND buyers on your platform. This generally means epic shit-tons of brand marketing to end users, which is where a lot of those millions of VC dollars go. There's really no way to get brand recognition otherwise -- you have to spend some ad dollars to inform users of your product. Ad spend is a zero-sum game from a competitive lens, so if your competitors are out-advertising you, they're going to win. And yes, this is why companies tackling two-sided markets focus on user acquisition over profitability.

You were also trying to fix the wrong problem. Focusing on the user experience is the right call, but your mistake was saying "fuck this, the distributor model is so fucked we can't do it". Ok, if the supply chain of a specific industry is super-expensive, your business model should be to streamline it by going direct and undercutting everyone else (this is what Uber did).

You needed to build a new distribution model. It's fair to say "I'm a college student and don't have time to fix this big problem" -- which is fair, supply chain problems like this are usually best left to people with experience in them or at least a passion for solving them.

[aherlambang]

Yes, so what you're saying is college student who sells aren't qualify as a part of my market since they can't fix this supply chain issue.

Which I also mentioned the way to solve it is to cut down the market size, so that only first hand suppliers are the ones majority selling

[exelius]

Or you need to fix the supply chain issue yourself by holding inventory. This solves a problem that your producers have and provides better service to your customers. This is what Amazon does.

The real problem is when you have a bunch of producers trying to sell direct to customers and drop ship is that it's a very inconsistent consumer experience. If your selling point is a compelling customer experience, you need consistency in how packages are shipped and changes communicated. All of that leads to inventory, shipping, logistics, and something that looks much more like a traditional e-commerce store.

Once you lose control of the customer experience in this way, it can no longer be your competitive advantage. So you either need another competitive advantage, or you need to fold up shop.