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Building Sofasto: The Cold Start Problem for a Two-Sided Marketplace

How do you get distributors on a platform before shop owners, and shop owners before distributors? Here's how I'm thinking about it.

Every two-sided marketplace faces the same brutal problem on day one: nobody wants to be first.

Distributors won't join if there are no shop owners. Shop owners won't join if there are no distributors. This is the cold start problem — and it's killed more startups than bad code ever has.

The Sofasto Approach

My strategy: seed the distributor side first, make the app useful for them even without shop owners, and let the network effects follow.