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 to contact you for jobs when they need to ship small ad-hoc stuff. That should give you an idea of demand. Then start posting on craigslist and facebook looking for delivery drivers, then start match-making. From there encourage the drivers you find to sign up on your platform for future work.

1) Incentivize people on one side to join without the other side. For example Uber paid early drivers money just for signing up even though they had no riders.

2) You provide one side of the marketplace to kickstart the other side. This would be like Uber hiring drivers in the beginning.

This is why starting a two sided marketplace often requires significant capital. They're very hard to start organically.

Another thing I'd suggest is to focus on a niche. Don't try to solve the global problem just yet. Maybe you know a lot of people want to transport books between London and Madrid. Just focus on that to get that market healthy, then add another product or location. This helps you focus your marketing. Also if you go global to start you might have 1000 users on both sides but no matches because everyone is too spread out.

Sounds like you don't have that. I'm kinda going to guess that you fell into the trap of building something without validating the need for it first.

Because to be completely honest, no business would ever sign up for this, and no reasonable individuals will sign up to carry anonymous packages through customs. The people that would deal with this for whatever $25 you can pay them are exactly the people you should never trust to carry your customers' packages in the first place.

in two words, two sided networks usually have a "hard part". in the case of uber, the drivers. in your case, i'd probably "do things that don't scale" like brian chesky did with airbnb, start with a super small location (probably where you live) and drive yourself / your cofounders / friends all the packages until people know the product works.

usually, with cold start products, you have to solve it many times in many locations. you can't do it worldwide day one.

I think you should instead think of this as a B2B2C type business. As in, Business (You) helps Businesses (B) find people (C) that would help deliver freight packages. Even then, it's not really clear why UPS or DHL or whomever would trust a random person in their car vs. their sophisticated logistics networks. If there is some gap in their network, that gap is your sales opportunity. Maybe last minute things? Urgent packages? Etc.

Carrying othet people's parcels across national boundaries is a really, really bad idea for the person involved. Drugs, money, weapons, explosives, endangered species, etc.

If you plan to run a business that facilitates this then you are exposing yourself to potentially very severe legal liabilities.

Honestly, just be the courier. Pick one route, find the senders manually, and drive the packages yourself.

For your marketplace, you could bring the supply-side by Fedexing stuff when you don't have a carrier. You'll have to lose money on the initial shipment, until you can route the jobs to the supplyside. This assumes you think the typical use case for this isn't smuggling.

The amount of jobs may be low enough at first that you can be like "You said Cairo to London, that will be $N." Then, if you can fill the job manually by finding someone somehow, then you add them to the platform and they do the job. If not, you send a prepaid mailing package with a Fedex label to the recipient and they ship it easily, and you subsidize it so it seems like a great deal to them.

Limiting geography seems like a good approach too.

Practical examples from a US perspective, where the existing customer has a strong anchor for timely delivery:

1. McMaster-Carr couriers tons of stuff to industrial and commercial facilities. Partner with one of their exist carriers.

2. Local automotive repair shops need parts delivered.

3. Durable medical equipment delivery.

4. Overflow capacity on your local contract FedEx routes.

5. Emergency runs for event or wedding planners.

6. Fresh produce, greens, and fish for restaurants.

7. Airport to hotel lost luggage courier.

That means either being the traveler and carrying things for others. Or be the demand and start shipping things this way and get some other people to carry packages for you.

I'd start with a slow rollout to friends, family, colleagues and even LinkedIn acquittances. You'd be surprised how many people are super eager to be the first to test your apps, even with a generic cold message like "hey, remember me? I built this cool app, wanna try it out if you have a minutes? I'll send you money to cover the fees."

We started in a single city (Boston), and just the coach side. The non-technical founder was himself a coach and had lots of friends who were coaches, so it was easy to get the first ~50 coaches across a handful of sports. From there we focused heavily on getting coaches to sign up with the pitch that it was free to them, gives them a nice profile / landing page they could put on their website or business cards or tell people about, and would eventually even start driving leads.

I think the cost/benefit was there for the coaches: little cost (short application) and some minor benefit even without the athletes.

For your idea I’d start narrower. One route or type of sender/package. Pick a high volume popular route and see if you can bootstrap the 2 sides just on that route alone and then expand. Then manually match people for the first 50-100 transactions. It takes some manual work to get that flywheel going

The problem with products like this is that for search to be useful, you need, well... data. And when your data is crowdsourced, you need, well... a crowd. That was the chicken-and-egg situation I found myself in.

So the way I solved it was by painstakingly clipping and recording ~8500 websites myself.

But the great thing about that arduous process is that it forces you to put yourself in the shoes of your typical user. And really, the only way to make good products is to have a deep level of empathy for that user. In my case, that meant streamlining the data creation process itself, the act of pinning a screenshot or recording, because I had to do it over and over again. Making it easier for myself ended up making it better for everyone else too.

Of course, all that data-seeding effort goes to waste if search engines and potential users cannot discover it. So you have to go all in on SEO, especially sitemaps, and on programmatic socials where possible. This is especially true for a product like mine.

A lot of these marketplaces also have relatively homogenous data, which is actually useful, because it means you can present it through templates and publish pages at scale automatically.

Unless you already have demand lined up, I would solve the supply side of the problem first. People who either travel routinely or are planning to, or just a lot of people from a specific, large community in order to target your recruiting campaign.

I would also spend a lot of time figuring out the user journey for both the supply and demand side. See if you can reduce the work someone on the supply side has to do to sign up. You might have to run this like a modeling agency in the beginning until there is sufficient demand to force suppliers to do more work.

Constraining to one route (SFO -> Honolulu) is how DHL got started.

Same as always, you need market-making: you do it or get someone else to do it. i.e. place resting orders that others will do. e.g. in your case, maybe there is a demand for one specific kind of item: let me say GPUs. Then you be customer number one of your thing, you buy GPUs in one place and have people move them to the other place in their checked bags or whatever. Alternatively, you make the other side of the market that is highly heterogeneous (say, Indian sweets) and you or your family fly between the two locations yourself. It might teach you about the time preference of your clientele etc.

Anyway, it would seem that ultimately all markets need market-makers to bootstrap.

At the time I was a partner in an ecom firm (few guys and a small warehouse), and I needed a new logo every week or two, so I had the initial demand covered. Acquiring customers is at least 3 orders of magnitude more difficult than acquiring designers.

I launched a private vbulletin forum and invited about two dozen designers from a handful of forums. I posted my first logo contest with a prize of $200 IIRC. I offered $25 each to the first 4-5 people that submitted, to get the ball rolling and building some initial trust. And just like that I had my first successful logo contest. Over a few months I would host a contest 1-2 times a month, and would manually message each designer when there was a new one.

In parallel I started development of the actual site. When it was time to launch, I manually imported the vbulletin logo contests, and kicked things off with a single contest that I was hosting. That site still wasn't a living breathing thing yet, until I had an actual customer that wasn't me. So I burned about $1800 on adwords over a month, and received 3 customers where I made maybe $100 in fees. A rough start, but running nevertheless. After that I was able to get Facebook ads working after lots of trial and error which led to the first 100 customers.

[1] It's not that the actions were hard, it's that a successful result had a low probability.

In this case I think you'd basically have to pay the drivers to make deliveries for yourself, and then work to show the value of this service to those whom need this service and are in a position to take over paying for it.

At the time I was actually doing this exact business idea and one of our founders worked at an airline.

I think in our case the main problem was incentives, we were suggesting low prices for the people sending packages but we forgot that the drivers need an incentive to drop it.

Best of luck!

For an example of this look for items on eBay whose shipping method is “freight.” As a buyer (or sometimes seller, if your buyer is clueless) of one of those items, it is your responsibility to arrange an LTL freight carrier (flatbed or liftgate truck). Fastenal and Uber freight will accept 1 pallet, up to a certain weight limit; you may even be responsible to bring it to a freight hub yourself. Above that size you’re on your own calling trucking companies, and renting a forklift or crane when you actually find a trucker.

It’s a smaller market than small packages, but more revenue per transaction. And if you figure it out and get it up and running, eBay (e.g.) might allow buyers and sellers to automatically select your service as the shipping method instead of black box “freight.”

Source = my personal experience 1. selling a metal building kit on eBay that the local zoning board would not let me erect. 2. Buying a large greenhouse kit online

You should already know what your largest city-to-city routes might be at this point, so why not focus on economy of scale there? If you need to rent a cube van to make it happen, do that.

This being said, your idea is not new https://www.traveltechnation.com/companies/piggybee

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 discounted tickets to people with the condition that they couldn't take any luggage. Why? Because the company would use their luggage allowance to send stuff. I believe it was mostly documents. Discounting an airfare by $500-1000 to send 50-80lb of documents was actually a good deal. I don't know how the logistics worked of baggage drop off and pick up but I believe it was relatively understood that the passenger wasn't responsible for the luggage. I assume the shippers had some kind of commercial relationship with the airline and handled all the customs declarations, import duties, etc;

2. There are times when businesses need to get certain parts or materials in a very time-sensitive manner. For example, I knew someone who worked in oil and gas. An oil platform had shut down production and needed a replacement drill part or something, I forget, and it was over Christmas. 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 through customs at the airport. This would likely save 5-10 days.

So there are some obvious questions to be asked here like:

- How do you make this safe and legal?

- Why isn't this just being Fedexed? Fedex is your cap on fees too;

- How does someone pick this up and drop it off?

- What if they get charged customs fees? How is that recouped?

- Who fills out customs forms?

- What about transiting countries? You may run into issues where something is legal in the source and destination countries but you transit somewhere where it isn't.

I don't know how you bootstrap this because you're going to be dealing with people who have way more experience than you at shiping thing sinternationally. More importantly, they'll have much more volume. That means they can send things via courier at rates you can't dream of getting. So how do you compete with that?

Even in the example mentioned above, the company used an employee to go pick it up. It was an expensive part so an employee could be trusted more than some random could.

Roadie. https://www.roadie.com/

It’s easier to narrow the domain of your market as specific as possible so as to maximize transactions and matching early on.

For instance, Uber launched in one city. This is so that all the growth efforts on both sides go to helping the markets meet. Twitch had to win with gamers before it could win in other categories. Pick a narrow domain for your business, perfect that user experience, then, as other have stated, prop up one side of the market yourself (probably the one least likely to churn forever) until the market can support itself organically.

- In most markets with money, shipping is a solved problem.

- Businesses can only survive in markets with money.

- The chicken and egg problem is one form of the general problem of markets: Trust.

- Experience shipping is the only way to understand shipping.

- This is an idea. If it is not impelling you to actually and physically ship, it is a bad idea.

- For generalized shipping you are under-capitalized and no amount of VC funding will build a general shipping company.

- The model has no way to ensure integrity.

Good luck.

What the hell, why would anyone perform such high risk activity

Also, get behind the wheel 24/7 and hop cities yourself, again at a loss, but that will help bootstrapping the actual business model instead of completely faking it.

That way the demand side can grow, and you split the supply side into synthetic and organic, synthetic is always 1-organic, but you are never left with imbalanced sides.

- What draws YOU to build a P2P crowdshipping marketplace? Is it just a hypothesis you have or did you suffer an issue that you can't find any existing company offer?

- Is there absolutely no existing company offering the product you need - why don't you call their sales team and ask them what it would take to build it for you?

I've seen founders find a profitable business that they hated running themselves (horrible founder-market fit) and I've seen founders learn why existing businesses weren't solving that problem (horrible unit economics).

Instead if treating yourself as an engineer excited to build a software stack and show off their skills, consider treating yourself as an investor figuring out the TOP 3 things that could get in your way of getting a positive ROI on your investment.

Fake it until you make it baby!

- you're on HN, so you have an opportunity to tell us the name of the thing - marketing

- perhaps consider your marketing budget to be the area you need to invest in now, and indirectly how that budget can actually generate a little revenue and exercise the engine - e.g. do you have packages you can ship through your service to announce it to others? Use your marketing budget to do it and collect your marketplace fees - marketing again. Nothing says I believe in my product like using it for real (IMHO).

- a bold and risky move (?) - most would say fake it till you make it - but I for one tire of this tactic. How about approaching this with honesty and reward the first adopters? "We're brand new but you can be the first to help us prove out this model?".

- your marketplace is a network. Search for an opening that has viral properties. Try to tap into something that has a network effect, go to where your customer is and see how you can target/advertise strategically and respectfully - become a trusted partner to one or more communities (e.g. thinking out loud, eBay sellers maybe?). This could include finding the right partner(s) who have a problem and are willing to give you a shot in an existing network.

On the last point - as an example of the viral thing - I worked on a real estate tool a while back. We found a viral hook - there were for sure properties that needed to be processed and worked through the tool - we email invited the parties involved in the transaction to invite them to work on the property in the secure tool, and we gave them the ability to invite others working the same transaction to the tool, and we focused everything on polishing that workflow and experience.

This way, as soon as one person used the tool they could invite others to use it legitimately to work in the tool and that was the viral aspect.

This points to, replace real estate tool and house with "package" and invite... and can you achieve something viral that spreads itself... like, when someone ships with your tool, it emails the recipient with the link to your site for status tracking and a call to action to make them want to ship using your platform.

This to me is a lot of marketing and product strategy around incentivizing the network effect.

Disclaimer: I never made millions of dollars off a marketplace. But I did help stand up the real estate mechanism I mentioned and that business reliably brought in 5-10 grand a month with no marketing effort and just that one mechanism, and it also helped us find a few key network partners. That's what drives my feedback.

Ditch this idea and instead build a Sales Enablement B2B Saas targeted at other YC companies, fuel the pyramid scheme by selling contracts back and forth between your other VC funded B2B Saas company friends and exit before the hype around you dies down.

Bootstrapping a two sided marketplace in 2026 is virtually impossible, especially one as esoteric and low value as what you’ve described.

It should just be "marketplace". The term implies the existence of a "one sided marketplace". But isn't that just a business? If I have a bunch of product on my shelves and I'm trying to sell it, I don't call that a one sided marketplace?