A little while back, I wrote about how I couldn’t sleep as I thought about the beachhead market that we needed to target. Our idea has undergone a major pivot since I last wrote that post, but even since then, it’s been a challenge to figure out the best way to get things going.

Marketplaces are hard, as you have to deal with the “chicken or the egg” problem because marketplaces work when the sides provide value to each other. So how do you get the first group to start using your marketplace in the first place? It gets exponentially harder when you add more sides, and we have three: audiences, businesses, and creators.

Audiences are the most critical as they provide the desired data, creators are what can help us get to them, but businesses are the ones that provide the capital to make it all work. I always saw the audience as the highest risk, and had been focusing on them and how we could build something that would be of value to our users.

As I’ve spent more time testing the different fronts, it dawned on me that it might be more direct and helpful to target businesses to start. Sure we won’t have the most robust software to provide to them, but at the same time if we approach businesses like an agency and provide immediate value, then we can still make it work.

This process would require a lot of manual effort, but it just might be the right beachhead to approach to start building traction.