Cold Start. How to open a market that doesn't exist yet — and how to derive your own numbers instead of borrowing someone else's.

COLD STARTHow to open a market that doesn’t exist yet — and how to derive your own numbers instead of borrowing someone else’s.Search for marketplace cold-start advice and you’ll be handed thresholds. Seed 200 listings. Hand-match 100 pairs. Flip the network at 500 transactions. The numbers are specific, which reads as rigor, and they are almost always traceable to nothing.I checked one all the way down. A widely shared 2026 guide claims 67 percent of failed marketplaces die on the supply side, attributed to a16z. a16z’s own published material says close to the opposite. The same guide’s sample size changed from nine to eleven inside a single page.That’s the median artifact in this category, not an unusually bad one.So this is procedures, not thresholdsSix steps. Each ends with a gate you either pass or don’t. 0 — Find the hard side. It isn’t the scarce side. 1 — Define your cell: the smallest unit where liquidity is achievable. 2 — Derive your own supply number from two constraints, capacity and coverage. Most founders calculate one and never learn the other exists. 3 — Earn the hard side with a tool that works before the network does. 4 — Match by hand, and measure the leak you’re creating while you do it. 5 — Seed supply without lying. There’s a popular 2026 tactic here that will get you sued; the chapter is precise about where the line sits. 6 — Know when it flipped, using the indicator that moves first. Plus two checks that aren’t steps: what the demand side actually needs, and whether the cell you made liquid is attached to a business.Every number is markedDerived — you calculate it from your own market. Sourced — it traces to a citation on the last page. Judgment — mine, unsourced, marked J in the text so you can discount it.There are twelve J markers. I’d rather you see all twelve than trust an unmarked one.The Step 2 model is mine, and the book says so, including which assumption is most likely to be false in your market and how to correct for it.7,542 words. About forty minutes to read. One quarter to run.Who this isn’t forAnyone who needs a number to put in a deck. Every figure in here requires you to go measure something first, and a few of them will tell you things about your cell you’d rather not know.