[andyangelos]

There are some success stories demonstrating that creating a buyer-seller hybrid is not always necessary. Take http://www.uship.com/ for example. Most ebay sellers and small business needing to ship packages will rarely have experience (or interest) in the trucking industry, but still need reliable delivery. The truckers using the service may list an item to be shipped in the future, but are most likely not the typical customer on the site.

The uship team just found two groups that were not paired and probably did a tremendous amount of legwork to create activity on both sides. I think sometimes you can just replace "they need to be the same person" with "we need to be solving a specific problem."