Your MVP Is Ready. Now Here's How You Actually Get People to Use It.

Marketplace Studio's latest post makes a pointed argument: building your MVP is only half the battle. The go-to-market strategy — how you recruit your first suppliers, seed your first demand, and create the conditions for momentum — is where most early-stage marketplace founders stall. Darren Cody outlines four core levers for early traction: cold outreach, community seeding, partnerships, and referral mechanics. The piece positions these not as growth hacks but as foundational GTM infrastructure that should be designed before launch, not bolted on after.

Marketplaces face a structurally harder cold-start problem than SaaS or e-commerce: you need to acquire two sides simultaneously, and neither side finds value until the other is already there. This means your GTM strategy isn't just a marketing exercise — it's a supply-demand coordination problem that requires deliberate sequencing. Founders who treat GTM as an afterthought typically end up with a working product and an empty marketplace, burning runway while they figure out what should have been planned from day one.

The deepest insight here is that early marketplace traction is almost never organic — it's manufactured. The most successful marketplace founders don't wait for network effects to kick in; they simulate them manually until the flywheel can spin on its own. This means hand-picking and personally onboarding your first 10 to 20 suppliers, seeding demand through communities where your buyers already gather, and using referral mechanics to make each new participant a recruitment channel. The strategic implication is that your GTM plan should map directly onto your liquidity problem: which side is scarcer, where do they congregate, and what's the lowest-friction way to deliver them immediate value before the other side fully exists? Cold outreach works in the early stage precisely because it lets you control the narrative and cherry-pick high-quality participants who will make the marketplace feel credible to the next wave.

• List your 20 ideal early suppliers by name this week and write a personalised cold outreach message for each — not a template, a real message that references their specific work or reputation.

• Identify three online or offline communities where your target buyers are active and spend two weeks adding value there before mentioning your marketplace.

• Map two or three potential partners — tools, platforms, or associations your users already pay for or trust — and draft a simple co-promotion or integration proposal.

• Add a one-click referral prompt to your post-transaction or post-onboarding flow immediately, even if the incentive is just recognition or early access to new features.

• Set a concrete liquidity milestone — for example, 10 active suppliers and 25 completed transactions — and treat every GTM action as a direct input toward hitting that number before you optimise anything else.