Start with a small local market (one town). FB started from Harvard only.
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#52Do it yourself, beg your friends, subsidize. You'll learn a lot by being the supply side yourself since you'll be talking to customers every single transaction. You'll also learn a lot about the actual unit economics, which I think are really hard for this problem in practice.
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#53My buyers and sellers were heterogenous, so I could not acquire one user and get both personas; I purchased supply which had publicly-measurable demand and resold it below cost (in line with my target CAC) to bring the demand on platform. Once I had aggregated enough demand and developed the demand-side marketing and trust, I brought in the suppliers directly.
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#54Man, I feel this. I'm literally grinding to get the first 30 active members for my own project right now and the chicken-and-egg phase is brutal.
Honestly, just be the courier. Pick one route, find the senders manually, and drive the packages yourself.
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#55Well it's easy you fabricate complete horseshit business case, fudge all the numbers, create a nifty slide deck and raise enough VC money to pay your early users in order to bootstrap your business.
Fake it until you make it baby!
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#56Free drinks for the ladies on Tuesdays.
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#57Most common advice is that you have to be at least one of the sides somehow. Reddit famously did this with lots of sock puppet accounts to foster discussions and create pseudo activity. In your case, I'd probably start by reaching out to businesses in mid-size metro markets, ones where bike couriers don't already exist, and offer to save them on shipping small packages. Build up a list of clientele and encourage them…
I dont think there is really an alternative to juicing it. Frankly I would do both sides even and make the activity very visible.
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#58Beware of drug and cash traffickers. Unlike ride sharing, where the end user, the passenger, is responsible for everything.
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#59[dead]
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#60In this day and age, I would never carry something for someone this way. It's such a bad idea. You could land in prison. Even if you're taking books, the spines might contain fentanyl. And I have no idea how you get past that. That being said, there is a long-established business for this kind of thing for companies, not individuals, that goes back decades. Here are two examples: 1. 30+ years ago companies would give…
> They could've ordered it. It would get sent and then sit in a customs warehouse until it gets cleared. That could take days or even a week or more. Not having it was costing half a million dollars a day. So what did they do? They flew someone across the Atlantic to the US to get the parts, pay exorbitant extra baggage fees (it was large) and come back with it. Why? Because passenger baggage would immediately pass t…
Christ some people. I grew stinky weed in an apartment in college back when it was very illegal everywhere. I could never imagine fucking around at the border of my own country let along another one.