In 2018 for creating the successful business you just need have an idea and passion to realize it. If you are seriously thinking about running the business, you should know that choosing the right business model is a major factor affecting your profit in the future. So, let’s talk about such an easy-to-implement but very cost-effective model as a collaborative marketplace.
There are two issues have to be solved before opening the collaborative marketplace. First one is choosing a nice for your future marketplace.
And the second issue is to decide: who should you try to convince first the supplier, or the customer?
- Tips for choosing the right niche for the marketplace you can find here: Julia Kush’s answer to How do I create an online marketplace?
- And about the second issue, I would like to tell more here:
This is a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum: drawing the attention of customers means offering a varied range of service providers but those are hard to come by when you don’t yet have an established customer base to offer them.
There’s no single, universal answer to this question. But looking at different types of cases, and understanding the user groups involved, there are some pieces of advice to deal with this problem.
Consider the example of a home-service barber marketplace The Haircut, a solution created with Cocolabs and uses the Cocorico platform to let people find independent hairdressers who can visit them at home.
Obviously enough, nobody will agree to become any platform’s ‘user zero’ by definition, a platform with almost no sellers will attract almost no buyers. Customers want something now, not the vague possibility of something in the future. So, launching a marketplace without users is a bad idea.
The same is true of providers. Anyone from them won’t commit to a new marketplace unless they can be convinced it offers tangible benefits.
In the case of The Haircut, customers looking for a home hair master are spontaneous, only registering at the very moment they wish to use the service. Good hair experts are usually not short of work. And they have had bad past experiences with worthless online platforms. All this means they take a lot of convincing to get involved in the new online service platforms.
What is important: Identify target customers, then look for their needs.
This is definitely the most complicated solution for implementing when you have simultaneous growth of your clients and provider databases.
In the beginning, the first two weeks, The Haircut did 75% of its business away from its online platform. This recognized that home hairdressers weren’t interested in the platform in and of itself, they simply wanted to get new customers. But as a community of motivated and experienced professionals grew together with its new-found client base, the platform offered by The Haircut seamlessly became the natural way for them to continue doing business. Source
Marketplace Startup 