I am developing an on-demand open marketing place website. I am in the development stages and should launch in 2 months time. However what has surprised me is that despite some of my competitors seemingly very new, recently launched, many of them have like 30k registered service providers. How do they do it so quickly? Without a product yet I've already set up my social media accounts and gaining plenty of followers but unlikely to yield thousands of first adopters. Anyone have any suggestions? Know how these new kids on the block have so many users? Should i get getting a marketing expert or recruitment expert on board? I have been managing this as lean startup so far and not using outside help until its necessary.
It sounds like you're building a marketplace, where you need to attract both buyers AND sellers. This is difficult because on day one you have absolutely nothing to sell and therefore no one to buy. My suspicion is that these other sites you're looking at are seeding their "service providers," to use your term. We had to do something similar when starting a job board. We had no job seekers (product) and no job posters (buyers), so we had to "fake it 'til we made it" by pulling in job postings from external sites to attract job seekers, then the job posters started to come, then more seekers, more jobs, and so on. But you do need to add value and not deceive anyone. If you help them, they'll appreciate your service.
Consider seeding your site with "service providers" or whatever you're selling. Lots of sites got started this way. I believe Quora seeded their site with both questions and answers for a long time.
Answered 5 years ago
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