[leros]

You need to cheat to kickstart one side

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.

[mohsen1]

Uber also paid riders to ride. I was working for Garret Camp at SumbleUpon and we got free Uber Black back then. The number of available drivers even in SF was so low that it was not really useful, even free!

[TheGRS]

IIRC Uber employees would jump into taxis and offer them money on the spot to drive for them.

Its priming the pump, I agree there's probably no way around it. Once you get some adoption you can use that experience to go to other cities. Hit social networks often to generate interest organically.

[garrickvanburen]

This. Stated another way, you need to start by either: fulfilling existing demand yourself....or being the demand yourself.

[sharnett]

Interview with Lugg (YC S15) with some details on how they did it: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/interview-with-lugg-founder...

[muzani]

They used to refer to it as "Do things that don't scale" rather than cheating :)

[leros]

I'd argue setting up a semi-fake version of one side of a marketplace is a little more in the cheating category. Plus it sounds more fun to me :)

But yeah same thing.