Building something for a really small niche is harder than I expected

Me and a friend started working on a marketplace project for a specific trading card game community a few months ago.

Honestly thought building the platform itself would be the hard part, but getting people to actually trust and use a new platform has been way tougher.

A lot of users say they want alternatives to the bigger marketplaces, especially because of fees, but at the same time they still stick to what they already know because that’s where everyone else is.

Feels like one big cycle:
buyers go where sellers are, sellers go where buyers are.

Still figuring it out as we go, but it’s been interesting seeing how important community trust is in smaller niches like this.

Anyone else here building something in a weirdly specific niche?