A dangerous mistake many founders make is trying to build a complete product for both buyers and sellers from day one. A more effective approach is to prioritize one side, create real value through manual work, and then use those results to attract the other side. Practical insights from mentoring the Steply project, Summer 2026.
When founders begin building a two-sided platform, or a two-sided marketplace, they often make a mistake that can drain their resources before they find a viable market: trying to build an application for buyers and sellers at the same time.
1. From Steply to the chicken-and-egg paradox
In the summer of 2026, one of the projects I had the opportunity to work with was
Steply
- a project from FPT University - a platform that encourages people to stay active and earn rewards by walking or completing missions. You can learn more in
Money X's Projects category.
Steply has two primary customer groups: This creates a familiar paradox: without enough active users, businesses have little reason to pay for sponsorships; but without sponsoring businesses, Steply lacks the resources to maintain attractive rewards for users. This is why I wrote this article: to help Steply and other two-sided platforms avoid the potentially fatal mistake of spreading their resources too thin, while finding the right validation sequence before making major product investments. When both sides are built simultaneously, the buyer-facing landing page may not have enough products or offers to choose from, while the seller-facing interface has too few customers. The team must run two acquisition systems, two user journeys, and two different sets of problems, yet neither side reaches enough density to generate transactions.
The mistake:
treating the completion of two applications as a prerequisite for having a marketplace.
A better perspective:
a marketplace exists when it has a mechanism for exchanging value that is attractive and frequent enough. Software is simply a tool for making that mechanism operate more efficiently.
Does Steply need to develop both sides of the marketplace at the same time? The short answer is:
not necessarily.
The two sides of a marketplace rarely have the same role, acquisition cost, or level of risk. Founders should examine at least four factors:
“Choosing one side” does not mean abandoning the other. It means
choosing one side as the launch engine and serving the other through a small-scale manual process.
Once value and data have been created, the platform can automate and expand.
A key lesson from the early stage of platforms that connect startups and investors is this: before building a complex matching system, the team can curate high-quality profiles, establish trust, and make the first connections manually. Early value comes from the quality of selection and the ability to create meaningful connections, not from the number of features. eBay began as AuctionWeb and created a place where buyers and sellers could trade directly. Its famous first transaction involved a broken laser pointer. The lesson is not that the founder should personally broker every transaction; rather, the platform began with a simple trading mechanism and later added trust-building tools such as a feedback system as the community grew. Airbnb began when its founders rented out sleeping space in their apartment during a period of limited accommodation in the city. Later, the team met hosts directly and helped improve listing photography. This is a classic example of seeding supply, focusing on a narrow market, and manually addressing barriers related to trust and quality.
The goal of manual work is not merely to save development costs. Its greatest value is helping founders uncover customer insights that a dashboard cannot yet provide: why users decline, what conditions make a transaction happen, where trust comes from, and what brings people back. At the early stage, the team can:
For Steply, the first reasonable hypothesis to validate is:
whether a specific group of users is willing to walk and complete missions consistently in exchange for rewards.
If this behavior has not yet been proven, selling advertising or sponsorships to businesses will be very difficult.
Note:
these thresholds are experimental targets, not industry benchmarks. Steply should adjust them based on the characteristics of its community, reward value, and mission frequency.
Stage
Objective
Lean Approach
Metrics to Track
1. Select a niche
Build initial user density
Select a narrow community, such as students at one institution or employees of one company
Number of eligible participants
2. Create a challenge
Validate user behavior
Run a 7- to 14-day walking challenge with simple rewards prepared directly by the team
Start rate, completion rate, and return rate
3. Operate manually
Understand friction
Use a chat group, forms, reward codes, and a reconciliation spreadsheet
Operating cost per completed participant
4. Package the evidence
Create a B2B asset
Prepare a report on participation levels and post-challenge behavior
Engagement rate, completion rate, and feedback
5. Test B2B sales
Validate willingness to pay
Invite 3 to 5 businesses to sponsor a small-scale campaign
Number of proposals, pilot contracts, and revenue
A marketplace should not report only the number of registered accounts. For Steply, a
unit of liquidity
could be defined as: an eligible user receives and completes a mission sponsored by a partner, the data is verified, the reward is delivered, and the partner receives the agreed results.
The priority metrics should include:
The chicken-and-egg problem is not solved by building two bigger cages. It is solved by choosing a sufficiently narrow starting point, creating real value for one side, and using that evidence to bring the other side in. For Steply, prioritizing a small user community, proving that it can create habits and mission completion, then packaging the data into a pilot proposal for businesses is less risky than simultaneously developing a complete B2C application and a complex B2B portal.
