Every marketplace has a cold-start problem. No buyers come without listings. No listings come without buyers. The classic chicken-and-egg, and the reason most marketplaces never get past launch month.
When I started hades.ae — a marketplace for buying and selling SaaS businesses — I had the same problem. UAE-focused, no inventory, no buyers, no reason for anyone to show up. The standard solutions (cold outreach to brokers, paid listings, content marketing for sellers) all take months to compound.
So I did the only thing that didn't require waiting: I listed my own SaaS products first. databaselists.com at $10,000. tovi.ae open to offers. A handful of others.
That solved the inventory problem in ten minutes. It also solved several problems I didn't know I had. Here's what happened.
Being your own first seller fixed three problems at once
1. The marketplace had real listings on day one.
Not placeholder cards, not fake examples — actual functioning SaaS products with revenue, traffic data, codebases, customer counts, the works. Anyone landing on hades.ae saw something they could actually evaluate and buy.
2. The listing template was forced to be good.
When you're listing a stranger's business, you can be lazy with the listing template — "they'll fill out whatever". When you're listing YOUR OWN business, every missing field is something you have to write yourself, and it surfaces fast which fields are dumb and which are essential.
The first version of the listing form had 47 fields. After listing two of my own products through it I cut 23 of them. Stuff like "preferred payment terms" — sellers should set that during deal terms, not at listing time. Stuff like "growth strategy" — sellers BS this and buyers ignore it.
The current listing form is 18 fields. None of them feel optional. None of them feel like padding.
3. The conversation with buyers became real.
When buyers reached out about my listings, I wasn't acting as the marketplace operator going "let me forward your question". I was the seller answering directly. I learned what buyers actually ask about (real numbers, real growth rates, real tech debt, why you're selling) versus what marketplace UX assumes they care about (pretty screenshots, lifestyle photos).
That changed how I redesigned the listing detail page — top of the page now shows the answers to the questions every buyer actually asks. Saves them two emails. Saves me two emails.
The supply problem solved itself
About six weeks in, the inventory problem inverted. Other builders saw my listings and started DM-ing me: "Can I list mine?"
I hadn't run a single piece of paid acquisition for sellers. Just by being the first listing on my own marketplace, I'd made it clear what category and quality of inventory was welcome. New sellers self-selected.
This is the marketplace flywheel kicking in earlier than I expected. Liquidity attracts liquidity. The first ten listings on your platform set the bar — make them genuinely good, even if you have to source them yourself, and the next hundred come on their own.
Why this works for SaaS specifically
This "list your own first" tactic works particularly well for the SaaS marketplace category because:
- The listings have intrinsic credibility. A real product with a live URL and real revenue numbers self-validates. Buyers can verify by visiting the URL. No "trust me bro".
- The seller (me) is in the same community as the buyers. UAE indie hackers, MENA builders, regional acquirers — same Twitter circles, same Telegram groups. Trust transfers.
- SaaS is fungible in a useful way. Even if a buyer doesn't want THIS SaaS, they want to see that you understand how to list SaaS, so when their own listing time comes they remember you.
It would not have worked for, say, a car marketplace (cars aren't fungible across markets), or a freelancer marketplace (people don't list themselves first), or a B2B services marketplace (no inventory to bootstrap with).
What I learned about pricing inventory
Listing my own products taught me something I'd have gotten wrong otherwise: most SaaS sellers price too high, then re-list lower three months later.
I listed databaselists.com at $10,000. Some advice said go to $25,000 — "you can always come down". The standard 4-6x annual revenue multiple suggested $20-40k.
I went with $10k because I wanted to transact, not list. The listing has had real inquiries from week one. A $25k listing on the same product would have sat untouched.
The signal I take from this for other sellers on the platform: if you've been listed for 6 weeks with no inquiries, your price is wrong, not your product. This is now in the listing-flow copy: "Most SaaS sells at 2-4x ARR, not 6x. Price for transactions, not auctions."
What's working, what's still hard
Working:
- The "own listings first" tactic — gave us a credible inventory at launch
- UAE-focus reduces noise. Buyers know if they're scrolling hades.ae, they're seeing UAE-built or UAE-relevant SaaS. That narrows the audience but raises the conversion rate.
- Maker comments visible on listings. Buyers want to talk to the actual builder, not a broker. Letting them see the seller's writing style in comments helps.
Still hard:
- Due diligence. Buyers want financials they can verify. We don't yet automate Stripe-revenue verification. Currently the seller pastes a screenshot, the buyer trusts or asks for live screenshare. We'll automate this eventually.
- Escrow. Cross-border SaaS sales involve trust gaps. We've handled the first few manually. Need to integrate Escrow.com or similar to scale.
- Selling the "why now" — most builders sell SaaS reactively (they're bored, lost interest, want to focus on next thing). Buyers want a positive "why now" story. We're building a "seller positioning" prompt in the listing form to help.
The unintuitive lesson
The default playbook for launching a marketplace is "go get supply, then demand will come". Or "go get demand, then supply will come". Both involve waiting and burning capital.
The third path: be your own supply, then both sides solve themselves. Works if (a) you have products worth listing, (b) the marketplace category fits your products, (c) you're willing to publicly transact your own assets.
Listing my own SaaS on hades.ae felt weird at first — like a real estate agent putting their own house in the window. Turns out that's exactly the right signal: I'm willing to use this marketplace I built, with my own money on the line, with public listings anyone can audit.
If you have a SaaS / website / digital asset you want to sell — UAE-built or otherwise — list it on hades.ae. And if you want to see what good listings look like before you write your own, mine are still up. databaselists.com is at $10,000. tovi.ae is open to offers. Walk through the listings, then build a better one of your own.
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