Customer Development and Marketplaces
Customer development is a method for discovering, testing and validating user acquisition and conversion methods. So that a marketplace suffers from the “Chicken and Egg” problem, i.e., there’s only a true market when they’re both there doesn’t affect Customer Discovery and some amount of Customer Validation. In other words, you can interview both sides of the market place, show them solution ideas, validate MVP features all without the other side of the marketplace being involved at all.
The pre-development signal you are trying to hone in on is “What will it take minimally for each side of the equation to come to the market?” In most marketplaces, what you will discover is that one side of the market is actually the product, and the other side is the consumer of the product.
