MatchPrompt: Automated Opportunity Aggregator & First-Touch Matcher for B2B Marketplaces

People tell me my B2B platform is a great idea, but getting them to actually use it is another story. What am I missing?

17 paying with 11 cancellations is the number that matters here. People don't log into a marketplace to browse, they come back because the last visit paid off, an opportunity they could actually apply for. If none of your 17 got that during the free trial, the £20 renews against an empty board. Take the smallest slice you can supply alone, one trade in one region, and hand-load it until someone wins without posting anything. Did any of the 11 who left ever send an expression of interest?

I haven't built a B2B marketplace myself, so take this as an outside perspective rather than firsthand experience. One thing I'd be careful about is treating positive feedback as evidence of demand. "It's a great idea" costs someone nothing. Logging in every week, posting opportunities and paying £20/month are much stronger signals. The 11 cancellations may actually be more useful information than all the positive feedback you've received so far. I'd speak to every one of those people if you can and try to understand the exact moment the product stopped being worth £20/month to them. Not just "why did you cancel?" but: \-What did you expect to get when you signed up? \-Did you get it? \-What would have needed to happen for you to keep paying? \-How often did you realistically have a reason to come back? Your instinct to manually create some early activity also makes sense to me. A marketplace can easily get trapped in a loop where users don't participate because there isn't enough activity, while there isn't enough activity because users don't participate. But I'd treat the manual work as an experiment, not a permanent solution. Pick a small group of users, create enough supply/activity that they genuinely have a reason to return, and watch what happens. If usage and retention improve, you've learned something about the activation problem. If people still don't return even when the marketplace is useful and active, that tells you something much more fundamental. At this stage I'd probably spend less time asking people whether they like the idea and more time studying what the people who actually paid do next.