CEO & Co-Founder, Marina Planas of TheNTWK interviewed Sjoerd Handgraaf, CMO of Sharetribe. In #TheNTWKTalks Sjoerd shared his Lessons from two seasons of Two-Sided MarketPlace Podcast.

We're sharing some takeaways with you:

✅ Start expanding only when liquidity is reached and find your atomic network.

- The product of a marketplace is liquidity. So marketplace brings two sides together, supply and demand. And if they match, and if you have a good chance that one side finds another side, you will have liquidity.

- An atomic network is the smallest network that can stand on its own. You can watch Sjoerd's great example about Uber from Andrew Chen’s book “The Cold Start Problem”.

✅ Do things that don't scale.

- Scalability is important, but early on the magic can only happen through manual work. Sjoerd gave an example of how the founders got creative and handed out leaflets visiting every parking garage to develop their car-sharing company.

✅ Handhold your first users.

- Don't push your users anonymously to a form which looks automated, take them by the hand, call them, ask the questions, get feedback, you have to figure out what motivates people, what is keeping them.

- Marketplaces do three things, they build: trust, efficiency and transparency, and they need to deliver on all three of them. And you need to figure out what's the thing that people value the most? And then double down on that.

✅ Fake it before you make it.

- Try to fake the feature and pretend it’s a backend while some people are doing it manually, and then see if it's adding value. Is this really what people want? Before starting to automate this feature understand what users want.

✅ Love what you do and have fun.

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- If you’re enjoying what you do, it costs you less energy. If you can do a job that you like, it increases your chances of success.

For more advice, examples and trends in the digital business model from Sjoerd Handgraaf, watch the video.