Why Nobody Wants to Be User #1
When I started building my marketplace, I thought the biggest challenge would be getting the MVP built.
Months of planning, designing, development, testing and refining eventually led to a product I was genuinely proud to launch.
Then I discovered I'd solved the wrong problem.
Building the software turned out to have a finish line. Building a marketplace doesn't.
Over the past few weeks I've launched on Product Hunt, submitted the platform to various startup directories, spoken with product managers, refined the onboarding flow, rewritten parts of the website and even started making code changes myself to improve the overall experience.
Every change has made the product better.
None of those changes have convinced somebody to become User #1.
I've realised there's a strange paradox at the heart of marketplaces. Nobody wants to be the first host because there are no guests. Nobody wants to be the first guest because there are no hosts. Rationally, everyone is waiting for evidence that the marketplace is already useful before they're willing to help make it useful.
That feels very different from most SaaS products, where an individual can often get value immediately.
I've started wondering whether the real product isn't the software at all. Maybe, in the beginning, it's trust.
I'm beginning to think my job isn't to find thousands of users. It's to convince a handful of people that they're helping build something worthwhile before there are obvious signs that it's will succeed.
At the moment, that has meant far more one to one conversations than marketing campaigns. It's slower than I'd hoped, but it also feels more genuine.
For those of you who've built marketplaces before, what actually got you over this hurdle?
Was there a breakthrough moment that suddenly unlocked growth, or did your first ten users simply arrive one conversation at a time?
I like the observation that the first product in a marketplace isn't the software—it's trust.
One thing I'd add is that the first users usually aren't joining because the marketplace is already valuable. They're joining because they believe they'll be better off if the marketplace succeeds. The early challenge isn't creating liquidity at scale—it's creating enough conviction that one side is willing to move first.
Hey Aryan,
That's a very interesting way of framing it. I think I will need to provide some sort of strong incentive to bring in the initial cohort of users. What that is, I'm yet to decide.
Interesting.
Your reply made me think less about the incentive itself and more about what choosing that first incentive quietly commits the marketplace to becoming over time.
I don't think I can explain that line of reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?