We had no capital, so advertising or solutions that basically involved "throwing money at the problem" were off the table for us.
We spent time posting in forums helping people find items they were looking for, and we had a few posts here on HN that generated short-lived, explosive traffic bursts. I remember those days we had posts get picked up on HN, it was always an exciting night!
We were looking at influencers and getting our name getting bloggers to talk about us, but, again, without capital, our options were very limited here. I'm sure someone with more of a marketing background would have found a bunch of ways we could have generated organic user growth, but neither me or my business partner had that skill set.
If I were to do it again, I think I would try to get someone with a marketing background involved to help gain traction. Without that, even the best product in the world will die of starvation if no one finds it.
Many shops do double list, this is true. However, I don't think its a solved problem. There are many people who do not want to shop on Amazon for their own reasons. There are also people who want to shop locally, and Amazon provides no mechanism to do so (that I'm aware of). There are also many smaller shops who simply cannot afford to list on Amazon, as there are considerable fees associated with running a successful business there. It was these smaller shops who we were initially building to serve, to provide a funnel for them.
Still, there were problems with our solution that if addressed may have provided a better market fit. If we had had more runway, we would have worked to address them, but that simply wasn't in the cards.
To me it seems like a small market. And worse, it's hard to conquer that small market since it's very fragmented. Even if you had money for advertisements, it still would have been hard.
On the plus side, though, if you had the skills to build that platform, you certainly have the skill to build a more profitable and easier to monetize platform.
we didn't, no, but we spent a lot of time sifting through our catalog, and there was a _tremendous_ amount of crap in there. We manually curated and purged shops that were obviously just dropshipping or looked like out-right scams.
I doubt it would be that easy, but, ya, using some form of automation is necessary. We devised a few rudimentary way to filter out the chaff, and it did quite well to remove the garbage. Still some would slip through, so it still required vigilance to remove them when you happen to see them.
