If you're building a marketplace why would you not seed it with what you have easiest access to? If you can perform a service in-house that will in future be pr

If you're building a marketplace why would you not seed it with what you have easiest access to? If you can perform a service in-house that will in future be provided by a marketplace seller and the demand is already there: do it. Users of my free app were asking for services that I could perform. I didn't want to perform the services myself forever but I had zero platform, processes and people in place to achieve that on day one. So I performed the services myself. This gave me a solid understanding of the customer problem and what I'd need to code up to enable service providers to perform the service directly with customers. Now I perform zero services with all of my service providers connecting directly with customers. We take a percentage cut as a true marketplace. The chicken and egg problem of two-sided marketplaces is hard. If you're building a meals-on-wheels service and you need to cook the meals yourself to get the supply side going: do it.