It’s critical to start with the right set of early customers to kick off all the self-reinforcing growth cycles we’ve discussed above. You have to start by knowing who your best early customers will be — for productivity/collaboration companies that’s often knowledge workers on remote and distributed teams, and often engineers.

Marketplaces win if they can more cheaply attract demand/supply then their competitors and are then able to extract the most value possible from the network without increasing churn. Upwork did this via the press. Fiverr did it via viral growth loops. Braintrust does it with crypto.