How Chefadora Solved the Two-Sided Marketplace Problem: From Mom's Kitchen to 100K Users

Starting a two-sided marketplace is notoriously difficult. You need creators to attract users, but you need users to attract creators. It's a chicken-and-egg problem that has killed countless startups. But Chefadora, a cooking platform that helps recipe creators monetize their content, found a way through—starting with the most unlikely first user: the founder's mom.

In a recent episode of the Levels Podcast, Sanjam Kohli, co-founder and CEO of Chefadora, shared the story of how they went from a single creator posting recipes through the backend to a platform with hundreds of creators and over 100,000 monthly active users. The journey wasn't smooth, but the lessons learned offer valuable insights for anyone building a two-sided marketplace.

The Problem That Started It All

The idea for Chefadora emerged during COVID-19 when Sanjam and her husband were stuck in Sydney, missing home-cooked food. Sanjam's mom would send recipes via WhatsApp—voice notes, photos of handwritten notes from a binder she'd kept for years.

"I hated the process of following that recipe because sometimes I could not understand what she was saying. If it's a voice note, I had to go back and forth and everything. But the food always turned out great."

As tech-savvy founders, they figured they'd just set up a blog for her mom. How hard could it be? They quickly discovered that WordPress and similar platforms were stuck in the early 2000s—complex, technical, and impossible for a non-technical person to manage independently.

When they tried existing recipe platforms, they found another problem: no financial return for creators. Sanjam's mom was spending hours editing recipes, taking photos, and creating videos, but getting nothing back except likes. That's when they realized there was a massive gap in the market for a platform that could help recipe creators actually monetize their work.

Starting With One: The Creator-First Approach

Chefadora's strategy was clear from the beginning: creator-first. They knew that without compelling content, they'd never attract users. But getting that first creator was surprisingly easy—it was Sanjam's mom.

"My mom, not surprisingly, was the first creator, first user on Chefadora. We actually had her putting recipes through the backend. So we did not even have an input form for her in the very early days."

This might seem like an obvious move, but it was strategically important. They had a creator who was completely invested in the platform's success, willing to work through technical hiccups, and producing authentic content that would eventually prove the concept worked.

The hard part? Getting creator number two.

"It took us the longest time to get the second creator on board. I remember I would check like first thing in the morning on my phone to see if other people somehow miraculously found us."

The first 10 creators were all people they knew personally—friends, family, mom's friends, relatives. It took eight to nine months before someone from Nigeria found the platform organically and signed up. That moment felt like validation, but as Sanjam notes, "we didn't realize that was hard to replicate."

The Sales Pitch That Scared Everyone Away

Early attempts at creator acquisition were rough. The team would find creators with significant followings on social media and reach out with their pitch. The problem? When you promise people they can make money, you immediately sound like a scam.

"Anyone who's promising money unfortunately comes off as a scam."

Their initial approach was too transactional—jumping straight into the sales pitch and, as Sanjam put it, "freaking them out and scaring them away." They got no conversions.

The breakthrough came when they stopped selling and started building relationships. Instead of pitching, they'd invite creators for informal video calls to get to know them, their origin story, what got them into cooking, and what their struggles were.

"When you treat people as your friends or partners, it's just easier and so much more natural for them to stay with you. Even if the platform is not ready for them or there are some features that they're looking for that we don't provide yet, they still stay on because they know you and you have that relationship and bond with them."

This shift from transaction to relationship fundamentally changed their creator acquisition. They weren't just signing up users—they were building a community of partners who believed in the mission.

The Google Ads Experiment

Like many startups, Chefadora experimented with paid acquisition. They briefly ran Google Ads targeting creators and saw lots of sign-ups. About 50% of those creators actually posted recipes and stayed engaged—not bad for paid acquisition.

But they hit pause on the ads because they realized something important: the platform wasn't quite ready to properly support and retain all these new creators. Rather than burn money bringing people into a half-finished product, they focused on building the retention mechanisms first. As discussed in their approach to building relationships over sales pitches, this patience with growth proved essential.

Building the Flywheel

The real breakthrough in solving the two-sided marketplace problem came from aligning incentives. Chefadora's revenue model creates a natural flywheel: creators earn money from ad revenue generated when users cook their recipes. This means creators are incentivized to promote their own content, driving traffic to the platform.

"Since Chefadora is designed in a way that creators are incentivized to promote their own recipes, so it just kind of creates a really good flywheel."

On the user side, they focused obsessively on experience. No paywalls to access recipes. No endless backstories. No intrusive ads. Just straight to the recipe with tools like an AI cooking assistant that knows which recipe you're following and can answer questions in real-time.

The bet was simple: make the experience so good that users naturally want to come back to Chefadora instead of bouncing between different recipe sites.

The Numbers Today

The strategy worked. Today, Chefadora hosts over 10,000 recipes from about 100 cuisines, with creators and users from around 180 countries. In recent months, they've hit over 100,000 monthly active users.

Getting there took patience. Eight months for the second creator. Countless cold emails and calls. Failed experiments with paid ads. But by staying true to the creator-first vision and focusing on relationships over transactions, they built something that solved real problems for both sides of their marketplace.

For early-stage founders facing the two-sided marketplace challenge, Chefadora's story offers a clear lesson: start with one side, make it deeply valuable for them, and build genuine relationships rather than trying to scale through pure acquisition tactics. The flywheel will come—but only if you build something worth promoting.

Key Points

• Two-sided marketplaces face a chicken-and-egg problem: you need creators to attract users and users to attract creators
• Chefadora solved this by going creator-first, starting with a single committed creator before trying to scale
• Early sales pitches that promised money scared away potential creators—shifting to relationship-building transformed acquisition
• About 50% of creators from paid ads actually posted content and stayed engaged, but the team paused ads until the platform was ready to retain them
• The key to the flywheel was aligning incentives: creators earn from ad revenue, so they naturally promote their own recipes
• It took 8-9 months to get the second creator, but today the platform has hundreds of creators and 100,000+ monthly users

Listen to the full conversation with Sanjam Kohli on the Levels Podcast.