This is a really bad idea for reasons already mentioned in other comments. Personally, I travel a lot and there's zero chance I would ever take someone's random package.
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.
Most 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 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.
this is really helpful, especially the "build a list of clientele first" part. I've been so focused on the product that I havent done enough of this groundwork. The craigslist/facebook angle for finding travelers is smart, it crossed my mind but wasnt sure
Yes, we called API - Actual Person Interface. One person on one side of the marketplace that does the heavy work to build the other side, kickstart the flywheel
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.
IIRC Uber employees would jump into taxis and offer them money on the spot to drive for them.
Its priming the pump, I agree there's probably no way around it. Once you get some adoption you can use that experience to go to other cities. Hit social networks often to generate interest organically.
Uber also paid riders to ride. I was working for Garret Camp at SumbleUpon and we got free Uber Black back then. The number of available drivers even in SF was so low that it was not really useful, even free!
yeah the "cheat" framing makes sense. I've been thinking about option 2, being the supply side myself at the start. Like personally coordinating the first few deliveries to prove it works before asking random travelers to sign up
option 1 is trickier when bootstrapped though. How do you incentivize signups without burning money you dont have? Curious if you've seen that work without VC funding behind it
Without burning money you'll need to be creative. Either do it yourself or go sourcing the supply side. Can you go find a group of people you can use to transport things and basically sign up on the platform on their behalf and then hand stuff off to them? Maybe you know some travel group that exist and you could pay them to take packages. You're basically acting in an agency model in the beginning instead of being a true P2P marketplace. It's a common strategy though it does often lead to just becoming an agency because it's more successful than your organic marketplace. This would be like if you called an Uber and Uber calls up a private driving service to pick you up.
I tried to do the same in 2015 (blablacar for packages, startup name was tomandgo) and we couldn't solve that problem, it is genuinely hard.
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.
This was my first thought when I saw "travelers going between countries."
You're going to have a problem getting carriers to sign up because they are assuming all of the risk. Unfortunately, "oh you don't understand - I got paid $27 by CarrierPigeon™ to bring this unmarked, brick shaped package into the country" just isn't going to fly with customs/feds.
This whole idea is dead on arrival because of this.
Most nations actively warn their citizens never to carry packages from someone you don't know, and never to carry packages you didn't pack (or saw opened) yourself even for people you do know. And still people agree to carry sealed packages for someone they had a few nice nights with on holiday before boarding the plane back home. That tends to end in a little room on the same airport with security/police grilling you before sending you on to the judicial system where the tough-on-drugs judge will sentence you to a couple of years of extra holiday. In a cell with rats.
There is no way to clear this legally and ethically.
Even across state lines is a big risk but carrying unknown packages into another country is astronomically stupid. You don’t get to play the “I didn’t realize” card, either, when you lie to a customs agent and claim you didn’t accept packages from anyone else.
Also sounds like something Ted Kaczynski would've been interested in using back in the day. It has all of the elements of a literal bomb delivery service: operates outside of the mail security apparatus, probably built on a shoestring budget so no background checks for the senders.
you should read the cold start problem (book). it talks a bunch about how uber, airbnb, zoom, github, dropbox solved the cold start problem in different ways. super interesting and well explained.
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'm the cofounder of Infura.io and we were building a 2-sided marketplace of API providers for blockchain infra. We bootstrapped it by doing exactly what you said: focus on one-side first. We focused on the provider side but we had that luxury. We had demand on the customer side already with our existing SaaS product. What we wanted to do was evolve our product to serve our existing customer base with a marketplace instead of solely by our product team. This is because of the evolution in the blockchain space of people interacting with dozens of APIs instead of 8 years ago when it was just our main Ethereum API. Serving the existing customers with a marketplace of providers made a ton of sense and so that is the direction we took the product. Over 2 years we grew it to a network of over 40 providers serving several dozen blockchain APIs.
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
A recent episode of [David Senra's podcast with Tony Xu](https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/tony-xu), founder of DoorDash has some interesting points on this topic. Essentially there, they restricted the service to one locality, and he and his co-founders were the first drivers. Once demand was proven and slowly scaled, there was an incentive for other drivers to join, and with more drivers it opened up a wider geography.
this is exactly the kind of specific example I was looking for. Going to listen to that episode. The "founders were the first drivers" pattern keeps coming up in this thread, that might be the way after all.
I suspect this is the best option. Focus on one city pair to start with, _you_ are the courier and find customers on that city pair. Then you can start figuring out how to attract people onto that city pair so you don't have to do it anymore (as there will be demand).
For advice let me use my current product. https://fontofweb.com is essentially Pinterest for web design. It does semantic search against a database of UI screenshots and recordings.
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.
You need to be one side of the marketplace first.
Uber started by the founders being the drivers.
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.
There is probably no other way than to seed it. You can do this with outright bots or contractors from fiverr, but people who grew up with the internet are very good at spotting inorganic growth.
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."
Do 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.
As a personal nit, I really dislike the term "two sided marketplace"
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?
The side that is most patient (e.g. the one likely to make money) is the one to start with. Once you build up enough on that side you can start being useful to the other side. The key is going to be whether or not this business model makes sense on unit economics too.
Volunteered, perhaps uselessly, without experience making a P2P market (so skip if you only want experience from actual doers):
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.
Check-in explicitly asks you "have you packed your bags yourself", and then you have to either say "no I have this random package from a stranger which might contain anything" or lie to customs.
TBH, I can't really think of a market for this that isn't contraband. The "last mile" looks really annoying as well.
Edit: I think it's a legit marketing question for OP. Name three different kinds of item someone might want to use this service for.
I'll even give you one: there's already a small cottage industry of reshipping companies from e.g. Japan, who will let you buy stuff from companies that won't themselves do international shipping. Ship to re-shipper, who then handles the international part.
You might be able to get a market started if your model starts with only items bought from legitimate retailers. Effectively a really long distance doordash.
I think it probably works fine for national delivery couriers filling space in their van with additional extra bulky items; services to disintermediate them to move heavy goods for less cost than a dedicated courier already exist and some of them even wrap suitable insurance around it.
Internationally if it's P2P rather than P2companythatdoesthecustomspaperwork it's pretty much pure smuggling-as-a-service, and yes, people who kindly help carry the stranger's Colombian souvenir on their passenger flight for a small fraction of the ticket cost will find themselves being jailed at the other end.
I can easily imagine a market for this, because I was in the market for this until last week.
I had a large, bulky, and fragile package I needed to send to Florida from New Jersey. The shipping corps were happy to do it for me for $500+, and no guarantee that it wouldn't arrive as a box of shattered glass.
I ended up finding someone in town who happened to be driving there, and was kind enough to deliver it for me. They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!
> They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!
Sure, but like open source, the dynamics are different when it's a favor without money changing hands. OP's market would want compensation, and then inevitably someone has to deal with the "my package arrived as a pile of shattered glass" claims.
It's a thing in second world countries too. There are small communities that don't get package delivery, so they ship packages to the capital city and then pay someone to drive packages to their community once a week or so. I've heard of people paying $50 a package in places with pretty low incomes.
fair question. BlaBlaCar, Uber, Airbnb all got the same pushback: why would you get in a strangers car, sleep in a strangers house. Trust infrastructure solves it over time: ID verification, package limits, photo documentation, escrow paymnts.
And people already do this informally all the time. Sending stuff "with someone who's traveling" is super common, it just happens with zero oversight right now. This adds structure and accountability to something that already exists
I think you are being too glib. The trust model is really different for small packages. Housing small amounts of drugs in objects is way easier and more likely than wrecking someone's airbnb.
And the consequences are higher for the driver. You can insure an airbnb or trip. Are you going to pay for someone's legal fees when they get popped for being a drug mule?
The bigger problem is that being a casual package courier is not worth the hassle.
Let’s say someone doesn’t want to pay FedEx $70 to ship a box next-day from San Francisco to Portland, so OP arranges for you to do it and charges $35, takes $10 off the top and pays you $25. Now you are supposed to drive to random person’s house to pick up the package, carry it across state lines, and drop it off at someone else’s house. You have to deal with potential flakes on both sides of this transaction and risk of carrying who knows what the whole time. For $25.
Would you agree to do this job? And if not, would you trust your package with someone who would?
I note that both Airbnb and Uber marketed as "use part of something you're not otherwise using", and almost immediately became professionalized. Full time drivers. People buying apartments to let out.
Maybe they wouldn't have worked without that professionalization? Which is of course not possible if you're going the "passing traveller" model.
This is the key thing. None of this “trust a stranger” stuff actually works out. Uber isn’t actually a rideshare. It’s a professional driver. Airbnb isn’t a room in someone’s house. It’s an apartment rental. GrubHub isn’t someone who picks up your noodles when they pick up theirs. It’s their job.
The courier model could totally work the same way. You want someone to drive your package from San Francisco to New York? Someone will happily do that. The trick is they will want to get paid. No one’s doing this stuff basically for free as a favor or to help OP’s company show a profit.
Maybe worked but at very small scale. The early Lyft with fist bumps and much more casual driver interactions worked at some level but was pretty small--and I actively avoided because of the vibe. You may borrow a tool from a neighbor but it's not a routine or neighborhood-wide thing for the most part.
This is completely different. While for Uber and AirBnb as the person delivering the service I have to worry about a private citizen either doing harm to my property (more statistically likely) or my person (much less likely), if I am pulled over by a cop carrying illegal goods I have to deal with the law enforcement.
Insurance can take of property damage.
My personal threat model is:
1. Law enforcement with qualified immunity and a “monopoly on [legalized] violence”
.
My 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.
How is this different from Uship? I've used that service and it's pretty good and reasonably priced. They do exactly what you talk about which is allow people to ship things between cities for a pretty reasonable price. You can either specify a price or have shipper bid on it, along with flexibility as to when it gets shipped. People end up being small-time shippers and will buy vans and then just deliver in between cities for as many parcels as they can ship.
Simply put, start with a niche market concept that helps solve very specific problems that people may have (such as delivering pet medicine to old or handicap people who live in villages or the countryside), and then to actually get started make an offer to those providing the solutions (the drivers) that is too good for them to refuse.
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.
A key term is ‘single player value’. One type of user needs to get benefits out of this marketplace as a tool so that you can use that engagement to solve the chicken and egg problem.
Yep I'm aware of PiggyBee, they actually shut down in 2022. Grabr is still around but international only, and focused on shopping. Part of why I think theres room here, especially for domestic/regional routes that the bigger players ignored. BTW I never said the idea was new.
Marketplaces are famously difficult to start - even Uber just started with black car service in a handful of cities and expanded from that. Find a trusted network of mules as your supply-side and expect to lose some money as you bootstrap.
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.
it's a great reminder that Uber wasn't a 2-sided marketplace to begin with, just an on-demand black car service, and Travis drove early on. The marketplace model came later, copying Lyft, more as a low-cost expansion strategy than a business model.
Failed to build one but my advice would be to focus very narrow. In your case start with literally between two cities. Also, fake supply by either paying people to do the trip (in addition to the normal payment on the platform) or literally do it yourself once per week. Focus on supply. It will be way harder to get.
I always thought of this idea in the city, there are lots of driving schools and perhaps taxi drivers that can drop packages off if the packages are not in a rush. That might be a start.
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 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 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.
> 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.
I knew a case like this where a coworker took a $50k networking switch in his hand luggage to Brazil. With the extra detail that the company it was on behalf of wanted him to lie to customs (because the import duty on electronics was something like 50%!)
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.
yeah. I have the same pain. But for your case, don’t start as a marketplace. Start as a concierge service on one route, one parcel category, and one trust model. If you can’t force the first 20 successful matches manually, the market is still too under-specified. my 2cents
Well 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.
- 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.
(for everyone else) I know this sounds cynical, but it's just a "flashlight" at a lot of the reality that surrounds entire startup "ecosystems". Founders should be aware whether they want to choose the blue pill or the red pill.
The only point about bootstrapping is that there's no "natural" bootstrapping. You're either not bootstrapping because you "own" (one way or another) one of the sides, or you're faking it. Any other "strategy" is a pipe dream meant to get to the bootstrapping-not-bootstrapping graveyard.
This is a really bad idea for reasons already mentioned in other comments. Personally, I travel a lot and there's zero chance I would ever take someone's random package.
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.
Most 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 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.
Agree, and for the delivery-riders side, you and some vlose people can start making the deliveries if possible.
this is really helpful, especially the "build a list of clientele first" part. I've been so focused on the product that I havent done enough of this groundwork. The craigslist/facebook angle for finding travelers is smart, it crossed my mind but wasnt sure
I dont think there is really an alternative to juicing it. Frankly I would do both sides even and make the activity very visible.
Yes, we called API - Actual Person Interface. One person on one side of the marketplace that does the heavy work to build the other side, kickstart the flywheel
You need to cheat to kickstart one side
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.
IIRC Uber employees would jump into taxis and offer them money on the spot to drive for them.
Its priming the pump, I agree there's probably no way around it. Once you get some adoption you can use that experience to go to other cities. Hit social networks often to generate interest organically.
Uber also paid riders to ride. I was working for Garret Camp at SumbleUpon and we got free Uber Black back then. The number of available drivers even in SF was so low that it was not really useful, even free!
yeah the "cheat" framing makes sense. I've been thinking about option 2, being the supply side myself at the start. Like personally coordinating the first few deliveries to prove it works before asking random travelers to sign up
option 1 is trickier when bootstrapped though. How do you incentivize signups without burning money you dont have? Curious if you've seen that work without VC funding behind it
Without burning money you'll need to be creative. Either do it yourself or go sourcing the supply side. Can you go find a group of people you can use to transport things and basically sign up on the platform on their behalf and then hand stuff off to them? Maybe you know some travel group that exist and you could pay them to take packages. You're basically acting in an agency model in the beginning instead of being a true P2P marketplace. It's a common strategy though it does often lead to just becoming an agency because it's more successful than your organic marketplace. This would be like if you called an Uber and Uber calls up a private driving service to pick you up.
This. Stated another way, you need to start by either: fulfilling existing demand yourself....or being the demand yourself.
I'd say it makes sense to build for one really heavily traveled route.
I tried to do the same in 2015 (blablacar for packages, startup name was tomandgo) and we couldn't solve that problem, it is genuinely hard.
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!
Beware of drug and cash traffickers. Unlike ride sharing, where the end user, the passenger, is responsible for everything.
This was my first thought when I saw "travelers going between countries."
You're going to have a problem getting carriers to sign up because they are assuming all of the risk. Unfortunately, "oh you don't understand - I got paid $27 by CarrierPigeon™ to bring this unmarked, brick shaped package into the country" just isn't going to fly with customs/feds.
I missed the “different countries” bit. Hell no.
OP, I hope you are on good terms with Trump, because you’re going to need that pardon.
This whole idea is dead on arrival because of this.
Most nations actively warn their citizens never to carry packages from someone you don't know, and never to carry packages you didn't pack (or saw opened) yourself even for people you do know. And still people agree to carry sealed packages for someone they had a few nice nights with on holiday before boarding the plane back home. That tends to end in a little room on the same airport with security/police grilling you before sending you on to the judicial system where the tough-on-drugs judge will sentence you to a couple of years of extra holiday. In a cell with rats.
There is no way to clear this legally and ethically.
Even across state lines is a big risk but carrying unknown packages into another country is astronomically stupid. You don’t get to play the “I didn’t realize” card, either, when you lie to a customs agent and claim you didn’t accept packages from anyone else.
Even just going to the Apple Store when you're in NYC for someone and bringing back a brand new Mac can get customs officials interested.
I'd be hesitant taking anything from anyone, even a child handing a letter to be postmarked in Florida.
And if you can afford that, you can afford to prime the pump, too.
Also sounds like something Ted Kaczynski would've been interested in using back in the day. It has all of the elements of a literal bomb delivery service: operates outside of the mail security apparatus, probably built on a shoestring budget so no background checks for the senders.
you should read the cold start problem (book). it talks a bunch about how uber, airbnb, zoom, github, dropbox solved the cold start problem in different ways. super interesting and well explained.
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'm the cofounder of Infura.io and we were building a 2-sided marketplace of API providers for blockchain infra. We bootstrapped it by doing exactly what you said: focus on one-side first. We focused on the provider side but we had that luxury. We had demand on the customer side already with our existing SaaS product. What we wanted to do was evolve our product to serve our existing customer base with a marketplace instead of solely by our product team. This is because of the evolution in the blockchain space of people interacting with dozens of APIs instead of 8 years ago when it was just our main Ethereum API. Serving the existing customers with a marketplace of providers made a ton of sense and so that is the direction we took the product. Over 2 years we grew it to a network of over 40 providers serving several dozen blockchain APIs.
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
A recent episode of [David Senra's podcast with Tony Xu](https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/tony-xu), founder of DoorDash has some interesting points on this topic. Essentially there, they restricted the service to one locality, and he and his co-founders were the first drivers. Once demand was proven and slowly scaled, there was an incentive for other drivers to join, and with more drivers it opened up a wider geography.
this is exactly the kind of specific example I was looking for. Going to listen to that episode. The "founders were the first drivers" pattern keeps coming up in this thread, that might be the way after all.
I suspect this is the best option. Focus on one city pair to start with, _you_ are the courier and find customers on that city pair. Then you can start figuring out how to attract people onto that city pair so you don't have to do it anymore (as there will be demand).
Partner as overflow, or undesirable route coverage, for a specific niche market of couriers in your existing location.
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.
Man, 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.
> Travelers going between cities/countries carry items for people who need to send stuff.
What the hell, why would anyone perform such high risk activity
For advice let me use my current product. https://fontofweb.com is essentially Pinterest for web design. It does semantic search against a database of UI screenshots and recordings.
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.
Cool site, seems like a really useful tool!
You need to be one side of the marketplace first. Uber started by the founders being the drivers.
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.
There is probably no other way than to seed it. You can do this with outright bots or contractors from fiverr, but people who grew up with the internet are very good at spotting inorganic growth.
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."
Do 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.
As a personal nit, I really dislike the term "two sided marketplace"
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?
There are three-sided marketplaces, like DoorDash, etc:
Restaurant, courier, customer
The doordash story is very relevant here - they started with a menu and a Google voice number and did the orders and deliveries themselves.
The side that is most patient (e.g. the one likely to make money) is the one to start with. Once you build up enough on that side you can start being useful to the other side. The key is going to be whether or not this business model makes sense on unit economics too.
Volunteered, perhaps uselessly, without experience making a P2P market (so skip if you only want experience from actual doers):
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.
My bigger question is how you would validate this isn't drugs because this seems like the perfect low effort way to send high value drugs.
Check-in explicitly asks you "have you packed your bags yourself", and then you have to either say "no I have this random package from a stranger which might contain anything" or lie to customs.
TBH, I can't really think of a market for this that isn't contraband. The "last mile" looks really annoying as well.
Edit: I think it's a legit marketing question for OP. Name three different kinds of item someone might want to use this service for.
I'll even give you one: there's already a small cottage industry of reshipping companies from e.g. Japan, who will let you buy stuff from companies that won't themselves do international shipping. Ship to re-shipper, who then handles the international part.
You might be able to get a market started if your model starts with only items bought from legitimate retailers. Effectively a really long distance doordash.
I think it probably works fine for national delivery couriers filling space in their van with additional extra bulky items; services to disintermediate them to move heavy goods for less cost than a dedicated courier already exist and some of them even wrap suitable insurance around it.
Internationally if it's P2P rather than P2companythatdoesthecustomspaperwork it's pretty much pure smuggling-as-a-service, and yes, people who kindly help carry the stranger's Colombian souvenir on their passenger flight for a small fraction of the ticket cost will find themselves being jailed at the other end.
I can easily imagine a market for this, because I was in the market for this until last week.
I had a large, bulky, and fragile package I needed to send to Florida from New Jersey. The shipping corps were happy to do it for me for $500+, and no guarantee that it wouldn't arrive as a box of shattered glass.
I ended up finding someone in town who happened to be driving there, and was kind enough to deliver it for me. They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!
> They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!
Sure, but like open source, the dynamics are different when it's a favor without money changing hands. OP's market would want compensation, and then inevitably someone has to deal with the "my package arrived as a pile of shattered glass" claims.
It's a thing in second world countries too. There are small communities that don't get package delivery, so they ship packages to the capital city and then pay someone to drive packages to their community once a week or so. I've heard of people paying $50 a package in places with pretty low incomes.
> the perfect low effort way to send high value drugs
They've already created a FedEx and an Amazon for high value drugs. They're called FedEx[0] and Amazon[1].
[0]: https://qz.com/1627572/drug-traffickers-favorite-way-to-move...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/world/deadly-drugs-paper....
Relevant Mitch Hedberg (rest in peace) joke: “ I love my fed-ex guy cause he's a drug dealer and he doesn't even know it”
Fair, I should have said even cheaper as well.
fair question. BlaBlaCar, Uber, Airbnb all got the same pushback: why would you get in a strangers car, sleep in a strangers house. Trust infrastructure solves it over time: ID verification, package limits, photo documentation, escrow paymnts.
And people already do this informally all the time. Sending stuff "with someone who's traveling" is super common, it just happens with zero oversight right now. This adds structure and accountability to something that already exists
I think you are being too glib. The trust model is really different for small packages. Housing small amounts of drugs in objects is way easier and more likely than wrecking someone's airbnb.
And the consequences are higher for the driver. You can insure an airbnb or trip. Are you going to pay for someone's legal fees when they get popped for being a drug mule?
The bigger problem is that being a casual package courier is not worth the hassle.
Let’s say someone doesn’t want to pay FedEx $70 to ship a box next-day from San Francisco to Portland, so OP arranges for you to do it and charges $35, takes $10 off the top and pays you $25. Now you are supposed to drive to random person’s house to pick up the package, carry it across state lines, and drop it off at someone else’s house. You have to deal with potential flakes on both sides of this transaction and risk of carrying who knows what the whole time. For $25.
Would you agree to do this job? And if not, would you trust your package with someone who would?
I note that both Airbnb and Uber marketed as "use part of something you're not otherwise using", and almost immediately became professionalized. Full time drivers. People buying apartments to let out.
Maybe they wouldn't have worked without that professionalization? Which is of course not possible if you're going the "passing traveller" model.
This is the key thing. None of this “trust a stranger” stuff actually works out. Uber isn’t actually a rideshare. It’s a professional driver. Airbnb isn’t a room in someone’s house. It’s an apartment rental. GrubHub isn’t someone who picks up your noodles when they pick up theirs. It’s their job.
The courier model could totally work the same way. You want someone to drive your package from San Francisco to New York? Someone will happily do that. The trick is they will want to get paid. No one’s doing this stuff basically for free as a favor or to help OP’s company show a profit.
Maybe worked but at very small scale. The early Lyft with fist bumps and much more casual driver interactions worked at some level but was pretty small--and I actively avoided because of the vibe. You may borrow a tool from a neighbor but it's not a routine or neighborhood-wide thing for the most part.
This is completely different. While for Uber and AirBnb as the person delivering the service I have to worry about a private citizen either doing harm to my property (more statistically likely) or my person (much less likely), if I am pulled over by a cop carrying illegal goods I have to deal with the law enforcement.
Insurance can take of property damage.
My personal threat model is:
1. Law enforcement with qualified immunity and a “monopoly on [legalized] violence” .
.
.
99. Everyone else
Uber and Airbnb had budgets to subsidize the first mass of people. Heck, I’m less than nobody and got paid the first several times I used an Uber.
Uber and AirBnB lied about their model as an end run around regulation.
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My 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.
How is this different from Uship? I've used that service and it's pretty good and reasonably priced. They do exactly what you talk about which is allow people to ship things between cities for a pretty reasonable price. You can either specify a price or have shipper bid on it, along with flexibility as to when it gets shipped. People end up being small-time shippers and will buy vans and then just deliver in between cities for as many parcels as they can ship.
Simply put, start with a niche market concept that helps solve very specific problems that people may have (such as delivering pet medicine to old or handicap people who live in villages or the countryside), and then to actually get started make an offer to those providing the solutions (the drivers) that is too good for them to refuse.
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.
A key term is ‘single player value’. One type of user needs to get benefits out of this marketplace as a tool so that you can use that engagement to solve the chicken and egg problem.
> basically BlaBlaCar but for packages instead of passengers
Roadie. https://www.roadie.com/
Every platform has this problem. Ycombinator even asked explicit to come up for ideas for this problem.
This being said, your idea is not new https://www.traveltechnation.com/companies/piggybee
Yep I'm aware of PiggyBee, they actually shut down in 2022. Grabr is still around but international only, and focused on shopping. Part of why I think theres room here, especially for domestic/regional routes that the bigger players ignored. BTW I never said the idea was new.
Marketplaces are famously difficult to start - even Uber just started with black car service in a handful of cities and expanded from that. Find a trusted network of mules as your supply-side and expect to lose some money as you bootstrap.
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.
it's a great reminder that Uber wasn't a 2-sided marketplace to begin with, just an on-demand black car service, and Travis drove early on. The marketplace model came later, copying Lyft, more as a low-cost expansion strategy than a business model.
"Focus on one side first" means get in your car and start fulfilling orders.
“But that wouldn’t be profitable!”
Failed to build one but my advice would be to focus very narrow. In your case start with literally between two cities. Also, fake supply by either paying people to do the trip (in addition to the normal payment on the platform) or literally do it yourself once per week. Focus on supply. It will be way harder to get.
I always thought of this idea in the city, there are lots of driving schools and perhaps taxi drivers that can drop packages off if the packages are not in a rush. That might be a start.
As someone who has worked on multiple marketplace startups, I highly highly recommend this resource: https://www.nfx.com/post/network-effects-bible
read andrew chen's book Cold Start Problem.. tackles this on all possible angles.
apparently there's a PDF (maybe of some draft) on his website -- https://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartP...
I’ll add another piece of feedback.
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.
Don't waste your time. I've been down this road and unless you've got business connections or a LOT of marketing money, it is not worth attempting.
In 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 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.
> 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.
I knew a case like this where a coworker took a $50k networking switch in his hand luggage to Brazil. With the extra detail that the company it was on behalf of wanted him to lie to customs (because the import duty on electronics was something like 50%!)
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.
Start with a small local market (one town). FB started from Harvard only.
yeah. I have the same pain. But for your case, don’t start as a marketplace. Start as a concierge service on one route, one parcel category, and one trust model. If you can’t force the first 20 successful matches manually, the market is still too under-specified. my 2cents
Well 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!
Free drinks for the ladies on Tuesdays.
A few thoughts from instant gut reaction:
- 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.
Take a page out of the YC playbook.
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.
(for everyone else) I know this sounds cynical, but it's just a "flashlight" at a lot of the reality that surrounds entire startup "ecosystems". Founders should be aware whether they want to choose the blue pill or the red pill.
The only point about bootstrapping is that there's no "natural" bootstrapping. You're either not bootstrapping because you "own" (one way or another) one of the sides, or you're faking it. Any other "strategy" is a pipe dream meant to get to the bootstrapping-not-bootstrapping graveyard.