Despite knowing customers would pay far more, Shopify intentionally underpriced its product. This lowered the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs, focusing on massive user acquisition and solving merchant problems first.

While most acquirers rely on brokers, platforms like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace can be a hidden source of off-market deals. Very small, less sophisticated business owners often default to these simple platforms to sell, creating unique opportunities for diligent searchers.

To test an idea like flavored creatine for women, use an AI image generator to create mockups. Post these images on Facebook Marketplace, a low-friction platform, to gauge interest via views, clicks, and messages before investing in product development. This provides quick, cheap data.

Intentionally create open-ended, flexible products. Observe how power users "abuse" them for unintended purposes. This "latent demand" reveals valuable, pre-validated opportunities for new features or products, as seen with Facebook's Marketplace and Dating features.

Marketers chasing trends on 'cool' platforms like TikTok create an imbalance where massive, older platforms have huge audiences consuming features like Facebook Reels but few creators serving them. This supply/demand gap for attention creates a significant, underpriced marketing opportunity.

Facebook's main 'Blue' app is an underpriced attention channel. Contrary to popular belief, usage among 22-32 year olds is surprisingly high due to features like Marketplace and Groups, but it's often unacknowledged. This creates a significant arbitrage opportunity for marketers who can reach this demographic at a lower cost than on more saturated platforms.

To balance platform and partner needs, think of your product as a mall. The mall provides a managed, curated discovery experience. But once a customer enters a specific "store" (a merchant's page), the merchant controls the environment completely, preventing cross-promotion of competitors.

When building a marketplace to help developers, instead of targeting all tools at once, launch by focusing on a single, specific platform (e.g., "V0 bounties" or "Cursor help"). This hyper-niche approach allows you to build liquidity and validate the model before expanding to a wider market.

SellRaise begins as a utility, helping sellers easily list items across multiple marketplaces like eBay and Poshmark. By aggregating a critical mass of sellers (the supply side), it can eventually attract buyers directly. This strategy allows it to leverage existing platforms to solve the chicken-and-egg problem before ultimately aiming to replace them as an AI-native marketplace.