The core feature of Waze for me (I may be wrong about this) is to get real time data on traffic when I am travelling to get to a certain place in a smarter way, faster.
This makes the real value of the application itself rely on crowdsourcing, but how can you get users to love your app if it will only work the way it is supposed to when there are at least x active users? There must be something in the equation that I am missing here.
What would you do if you had to fight two people? Probably take one down with the swiftest, least fair, methods.
Usually a company that has broken into a two-sided market left a body hidden somewhere. It might involving working for a very long time (a ‘social network’ funded by intelligence agencies), having a huge budget for paid advertising, effective public relations to get vast unpaid media coverage, spamming, data scraping, smoke, mirrors, unscalable methods at the start, etc.