Sjoerd Handgraaf has spent over ten years at Sharetribe, the marketplace software platform, where he is a tiny part-owner and has worked with hundreds of marketplace founders at every stage — from idea validation to scaling past meaningful transaction volume. For his podcast Two-Sided - The marketplace podcast he has talked to 30+ founders and early employees of some of the world's most successful marketplaces.

Through all this he has seen what separates marketplaces that find liquidity from those that stall, and has translated that pattern recognition into practical frameworks for founders. Alongside his work at Sharetribe, he runs an independent consulting practice, focused on marketplace strategy, growth, and platform business design for founders who want direct, actionable guidance.

Sjoerd can help with the following:

• Designing a marketplace business model that survives first contact with the market: define your monetization, commission structure and pricing tiers, choose between platform and aggregator models, decide which side to prioritize first, and position competitively before committing budget to growth.
• Solving the cold-start and chicken-and-egg problem: build a hard-side-first acquisition strategy, identify your highest-leverage early channels, design trust mechanisms that convert cautious first-time users, and map a clear path to your first meaningful liquidity threshold
• Building durable, compounding growth: develop a compounding growth strategy, design growth loops and find network effects that strengthen over time

Links: Everything Marketplaces profile, LinkedIn

"Sjoerd brings a rare mix of deep marketplace expertise and a very direct, no-nonsense approach. He quickly understood our business model and provided actionable advice that we could implement immediately. His experience from seeing hundreds of marketplaces gave us shortcuts we wouldn't have found on our own."‍

-Ritz Steytler, CEO of Axora

"Sjoerd has been an invaluable sparring partner for us. His deep understanding of marketplace dynamics helped us think through our liquidity analysis in a structured way. He challenged our assumptions and pushed us to focus on the metrics that actually matter for marketplace growth."

-Malte Zur, CEO of Testxchange