How to balance supply and demand on marketplace platforms
Most marketplaces don’t die because they’re too small.
They die because they never become liquid.
You can have thousands of sign-ups and still have no real market.
In this 40-minute micro-session, we’re unpacking our latest learning brief: “From Cold Start to Liquidity: Escaping the Chicken-and-Egg Dilemma.”
But when we say liquidity, we don’t mean profitability, scale, or exit potential.
We mean something much more practical:
Does your supply consistently get work?
Does your demand consistently get served?
And does that happen without friction or churn?
This study is drawn from hands-on work with jobtech marketplaces that have wrestled with:
Oversupply spirals
Idle workers and frustrated customers
Winner-takes-all dynamics
False growth driven by vanity metrics
Scaling too early and breaking trust
Mark Schoeman, who led the research, will walk us through:
What liquidity actually means (and how to know if you have it)
How to identify your “hard side” - demand or supply
Why atomic networks beat broad expansion
The network health metrics founders should be obsessing over
When you’re actually ready to scale and when you’re lying to yourself
The presentation will be followed by a power panel featuring:
1. Chinwe Udo-Davis - Founder & CEO, Instollar.
2. Giselle Gonzales - Founder & CEO, EqualReach.
3. Angelo Kalaw - Co-Founder & CEO, Mavu.
4. Awazi Angbalaga - Co-Founder, Shaaré.
This session is ideal for:
Founders building 2-sided or 3-sided marketplaces
Jobtech operators stuck in the cold-start phase
Teams seeing growth but not utilisation
Anyone trying to move from “users” to a functioning labour market
We’ll cover key highlights from the study, then open the floor for discussion.