What strategies have you used to seed a marketplace?
I am about a week in to cold outreach to chefs and possible cooking coaches for https://www.wethecooks.com. If I measure success by how many people I've convinced to sign up to be an instructor... I've failed 😅 however I have received positive signals from those that did reply.
What strategies has the IH community tried in the past? What were your results?
Interesting concept.
First I would start by creating fake 4x or 5x Chef accounts to attract other Chefs to do the same, make sure the fake accounts you do have all their details filled in. i.e if your site supports multiple recipes, description about the recipe, videos, multiple photos etc. This way you set the standard for other chefs who might join the platform.
2nd you have to convince new Chefs to join. i.e I created Dupaws.com marketplace for pet sitters and pet owners (I ask pet sitters to join the platform, but I give them an introduction page when they click on that icon before asking them to login) https://www.dupaws.com/become-a-sitter
3rd you might have to add crazyegg or hotjar to see in real-time how users interact with your websites, sometimes it might be a user drop that is happening at a specific task, you might have a dropoff somewhere you don't know (or a button not being clicked etc).
4th in order to test fast, you have to do some Facebook advertisement especially to gain your first set of users and let some Chefs build their pages so that you have some SEO presence. (Make sure each Recipe has it's own page with a full description, the more content the better for SEO to pick it up).
5th and most importantly is to test if users/customers are interested in buying, If you have 1000 visitors come to your website and they have a choice between 20x to 30x Chefs/Recipes yet no one pays, that might indicate your idea is not workable and could put an end to the test (of course you have to watch users journey as sometimes they might fail to checkout for technical reasons).
Hope this helps.
a lot to unpack here, thanks for the long response! did you try the 4-5 fake accounts for dupaws? what were your results?
In Dupaws case I created only 2 fake profiles, they weren't 100% fake actually, one was my profile and the other one was my wife's. We did complete profiles with so many photos and description so that when other users join they would follow the same structure as our profiles.
Once I started running some ads on Facebook I noticed users started sending us requests to keep their pets and then I realized that this thing can work. I then pushed for more supply (pet sitters). The problem is that if you only have 2 sitters joined on your platform (like in my case). Other users wont be keen to spend time and create profiles. They will assume this is a rubish website, however when people see that there are 40+ pet sitters, then you will see the conversion is 10x higher.
Just think about it yourself. If you came to indiehackers and found only 2 posts. Would you create an account and ask people for their opinions? :)
Hope this helps
Can you create accounts on behalf of chefs and start getting them leads? They need to see the value first before they spend their time on it.
removing friction -- thanks!
It took me reading your blog post to understand what you are offering: a live webcam session with a cook who can guide you in the process?
A 'how it works' may do wonders, along with more direction on the session details page
Absolutely, I'm playing catch up on content as I didn't want to wait for everything to be done to start reaching out and developing relationships
This doesn't feel like a classic 2 sided market, it's very skewed one, you can start with 1-3 instructors, fill more offers from each, get customers until you overwhelm them with clients and you would have no problem getting more instructors.
There isn't much benefit in chasing instructors.
great though here, I'll have to rethink my reasons for pushing the supply side aggressive vs demand side
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago
both exist, seems to me like a messaging problem on my end