Chicken and Egg problem
For anyone who is unfamiliar with this term, lemme explain it with an example.
Let's say you are building a marketplace - no one wants to be among the first users, sellers look for buyers in a marketplace, buyers look for sellers in the marketplace before joining.
This applies to apps like tinder, uber, airbnb, online games, etc. This is one of those hardest problems to solve when building such an app - and I don't see it being discussed here at all.
Is anyone here working on anything that has the Chicken and Egg problem? How are you planning to solve it?
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Any network based platform suffers heavily from 'Chicken and Egg' as well, e.g. 'Dating platform' i.e. users would use a new dating platform only when they get matching dates and there will be matches only if there are enough users.
In fact YCombinator had a specific question on how your product solves that problem in their application.
I've run a fairly large networking platform in the past, my go to strategy to solve C&E now from that experience is to reduce target market to a manageable size where we can control as many variables as possible.
Interesting. Can you give an example how you would do that (reduce target market) for a dating app?
Sure, e.g. Facebook, Tinder solved it by introducing their service only specific colleges at first.
In fact Tinder's Whitney Wolfe went to a single college, pitched to boys from a frat party that girls from their college are looking for them in their app, Went on to another frat party and pitched to the girls there that boys from their college were looking for them in their app.
You know how Reddit solved this problem?
They created real conversations but populated them with comments from fake profiles.
It's ok to 'do things that don't scale' in the early days.
Without those 'seeded' threads, Reddit would have otherwise been empty, exactly as you describe.
Side note - have you (or anyone, open to comment) ever thought about the business models of two sided marketplaces like Tindr? Is it not in their interest to keep you as a user? In a world where people choose a partner and then stay with that person for a while, possibly for ever, Tindr then obviously loses both those users because they no longer need to date others.
Leaving different relationship types like 'open relationships' aside for a moment, this is an entertaining kind of reverse egg and chicken like their app is self destructive!
Assuming the goal of a dating app is to get every single person hooked up, the end game is therefore zero users available. I guess in reality this would never happen but it makes you wonder about how good they might want to get at matching you with potential mates. i.e. not very.
Anyway, back to eggs and chickens.
You literally have to go to the vendors and the buyers one by one and make the introductions until you have some kind of critical mass. There seems to be advice that recommends focussing first on suppliers for the demand. That is to say, promise demand will come if they first commit to supply.
There is an interesting thread on Hacker News about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815156
This makes sense. HN thread is very interesting.
"fake it till you make it" ;)
"I guess in reality this would never happen but it makes you wonder about how good they might want to get at matching you with potential mates. i.e. not very."
I'm not sure that I entirely agree with you. It seems to me that there will always be single people and therefore, the better you get at matching (e-harmony's marketing talks about successful they are at it) the more successful the app. The pool of daters includes young people just starting to date all the way to newly singled (widows, widowers, divorcees).
Like many businesses, there is a network effect to social media applications and dating sites. That is, the more people using it, talking about it, rating it etc - the more people will talk about it and use it.
How'd they build their apps and brands? Like everyone else - one user at a time.
@richardesigns interestingly enough, Hinge is one of the larger dating apps that is embracing the slogan of 'designed to be deleted' - which is great marketing.
I used to work on a marketplace and found great content by James Curries from Network Effect (NFX). For example, in this video, he talk about how companies solved chicken and eggs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGWG3_vfxiQ
Will definitely check out his videos.
We have a Bluetooth Marketplace concept that we've just started but it's a side hustle that's related to the core of our business, which is an Android app that people use to manage Bluetooth devices (and locate lost devices). The goal is to continue to find ways to grow our app business while plugging away at the Marketplace.
I publish a top 20 list of the most popular Bluetooth devices used by our app users. People can go to our Marketplace and buy those same or representative products (we can't distinguish all of the devices via the Bluetooth device name).
We also are just about finished adding the Leaderboards and Statistics from our app to our marketing website.
There will be a link to the Marketplace in our app and I share the list to social media.
Where the Marketplace, Leaderboards, and Statistics are concerned, we have multiple goals:
Many startups have figured out their way around this problem in their own unique ways. But if you read some of the hacks which these startups used, you will come to know that it is mostly doing things that didn't scale. (y combinator lingo)
All chicken-egg problem are unique and similar in lot of senses. So there is no set playbook here. Do you have any particular problem that you are struggling with? I'd love to brainstorm.
Ours at Thinkbase.com is experts vs users. We've written some articles to get SEO->users to the page that we would then like to convert to 'experts' to build wizards. This is just a first try really. For now it does not seem to work (yet)...
Addressing the "Chicken and Egg problem" is indeed a vital concern when building two-sided marketplaces. In my experience, starting with a targeted focus, such as incentivizing one side or forming strategic partnerships, can help kickstart activity on the platform. Patience and adaptability are key, as achieving equilibrium takes time. Each marketplace may require a unique approach, but understanding the challenge is the first step toward finding a solution.
Well, I am working on heygamer.co which has the exact same problem. I must say that solving it requires attention and time. I found my way to work on "crumbles" to attract 1 side. In my case attracting money-bringing side is almost impossible. So you have to focus on the other side. And they are job-seekers..
What do I do? I hired a data entry guy who is entering the current job openings at low cost. And I am working on 2 different value-providing side products to bring people. I am aware that I also need to start to produce content but I decided to do it 1 by 1. Not rushing it.