Cold Start
Buyers wait for sellers, sellers wait for buyers, nobody arrives first.
What it looks like Illustrative scenario
A founder launches a marketplace for a specialty trade with thirty sellers signed up on promises. The first buyers find thin listings and leave. The sellers, seeing no buyers, stop updating. By month four the platform is a directory of people who have stopped checking it.
Scenario: When Your Market Barely Exists
How an AI intervention works AI Synthetic Bootstrapping
Nobody arrives first, so synthetic bootstrapping populates the market before anyone real joins. Its personas, built from public data and domain schemas, do three jobs: stress-test the semantic matching engine during development; show sponsors what a working market looks like before capital is committed; and recruit and train the first real users, who meet a live market, not an empty one. Then comes a hard changeover: synthetic personas are retired and never mixed with real participants; the trust signals that follow are earned by real transactions only.