Sharetribe’s advice for marketplace founders is to onboard supply before launching your marketplace to customers. Providers usually have more incentive to join your marketplace than customers. If you can sell them on the revenue potential, they’ll be likely to sign up and create listings: even if they can’t expect earnings right away. You can also curate their listings to make sure they’re high quality.

At the same time, you can start inviting customers to create accounts without giving them access to listings. This way, you’ll capture their emails and can send them a newsletter when you launch.

Learn how to set up onboarding mode in your Sharetribe marketplace below.

While your marketplace is in onboarding mode, your providers can sign up and create listings but won’t be able to see others’ listings or user profiles. You can also invite customers to sign up to get notified when you launch, but not show them any content, other than their own user profile.

You can also keep working on your marketplace content in your test environment while simultaneously onboarding users in your live environment. For example, you can create a simple pre-launch landing page for onboarding. While people are signing up and creating listings, you can work on your actual landing page in your test environment (such as adding some featured listings to it). Learn more about how environments work.

After you’ve onboarded your initial supply and user base, you can launch your marketplace. Customers will find a lively marketplace with high-quality listings, and transactions can start happening right away.

You enable the onboarding mode with Sharetribe’s access control settings in Console, General → Access control. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make your marketplace private by turning on the setting “Make marketplace private”. Users who aren’t logged in won’t be able to view listings or user profiles.

2. Turn on the setting “Restrict rights to view listings”. This feature becomes available when you make your marketplace private. It means users who are logged in won’t be able to view others’ listings or user profiles until you grant them permission to do so.

You can add a call-to-action to a page people will see when they try to access listings or others’ user profiles. For example, you could prompt providers to subscribe to get posting rights.

You can also modify the user interface text on the access control page in the marketplace text editor. Here’s how:

3. Invite people to sign up and create listings on your marketplace. If you already have a mailing list of interested providers, now’s the time to invite them in. Or use other ways to find supply. Check out our article on building supply in Marketplace Academy to learn how.

Onboarding mode is a temporary state that ends once enough supply has joined your marketplace. At this point, you should enable customers to view listings and start transactions with providers.

1. Once you’ve have enough supply or your planned launch date is at hand, you have two options to move forward:

2. (Optional) Turn off “Make marketplace private” if you want non-logged-in visitors to see listings. If you still want listings to only be visible for users who are logged in, you should leave this setting on.

3. Launch! Export user emails from Console, add them to your mailing list, and send everyone an email about your launch.

You don’t need to move directly from onboarding mode to a big bang launch. You can have a private beta phase, where you invite people in gradually to learn more about what your users want and how your platform is succeeding in filling their needs.

Here’s how you implement a private beta in Sharetribe:

Learn more about launching a marketplace in Sharetribe’s Marketplace Academy.