Idea validation

Hey there, I have built 2 marketplaces in the past, and would like to share with you my experience:

First to know about the marketplaces I built and get some perspective:

1- Dupaws.com connecting pet parents to pet sitters, this has found great success in Dubai as there was no other solution for it. I am making 2 to 3k per month with it. However the problem that I ran into with it, is that there is not enough search on Google for pet sitters etc. I didn't do google keywords research before building this one and realized later, even when I am ranked #1 still the traffic was slow, but hey 2k USD per month isn't that bad :)

2- Mate.ae connecting rooms and roommates in Dubai, this one was interesting, again there was no other service specific to this, I found a lot of search terms in Google for people looking for shared apartments. However the interesting thing is that no one is willing to pay for this service, people want to go for the cheapest room not the perfect room, so no one was willing to pay even if they found a perfect roommate on my platform. Eventually I ended up monetizing this with Google Adsense as traffic reached 500 users per day and it's growing 20% month over month. ( google adsense is the last resort).

Things to keep in mind, if you are building a marketplace:

1- make sure there is enough search traffic for the problem you are trying to solve, otherwise you will spend tons of money to acquire customers/businesses, the marketplace have to be organic, otherwise it will likely fail. (so make a google keyword research on the baby events/baby birthday etc in your region).

2- Sometimes it's better to open up for more possibilities, in my case, I should have built Mate.ae to be more generic instead of only renting rooms or finding roommates, I could have allowed users to list their apartment not only room, I could have allowed users to sell their room stuff etc, this way I'd get more organic traffic on new keywords, I narrowed down too much and realized customers didn't care much about the idea. In your case I'd make a platform for events in general, not only baby birthdays, but what about adults birthday party? what about office parties, or even weddings. If you are marketplace then nothing stops you from connecting different businesses to customers, this way at least you might find a model that people care to pay for.

3- When building a marketplace make sure to never use SPA (single page application) as it will hurt your SEO, my first website Dupaws.com was SPA and I suffered in SEO until I built a side project (MVC for the same website) just for SEO purposes.

Hope this helps.

Hi there 👋

1. You could take out some ad space with Facebook or Google. You could also find online communities where parents already hang out, (e.g. NetMums) and introduce yourself and your service there.

2. Google Forms is a free service and also easy to set up. Picking the right questions is a bit harder. The best way to conduct early market research is to avoid asking questions that directly relate to your solution / product, for instance, 'would you buy from a site that did xyz for you?', and 'What do you think of our logo?', but ask questions that reveal the core pain points that you think your audience has, for instance 'Have you ever booked an entertainer for your child's party in the last five years?', and 'Was it easy to do?'. Essentially you want to open up conversation around the problem, and not so much the solution (at least at first).

Also, talking to 4 or 5 potential customers can give you enough feedback to get a good sense of the problem space. I'm sure you can find some parents on IH!

Good luck.