Best way to build influencer marketing platform

I am software engineer and have 2+ years of experience in digital marketing industry.

I am thinking about making a influencer marketing platform and currently I am confused as to what should be the initial plan.

It is a chicken and egg problem, as agencies and brands won't be attracted if there is not a lot of influencers and inverse is also true. One strategy that I have learned from some entrepreneurs is that I can build the platform and start onboarding influencers and brands/agencies will come later on.

Biggest problem now is thinking about growing the influencers base.
(sidenote: some companies claim to have 3+ million influencers on their platform) I can see 2 possible options:

Option 1:

• Use a crawler/scraper or hire someone to get profiles, then somehow make them searchable/filterable
• Show this tool to brands and contact to influencers on their behalf to properly onboard them.
• This saves time spent in communication and require a bit more technical knowhow but is doable.
• This will mean no relation to the user until required and using their data to promote my business does sound kind of wrong but as long as it works I am not opposed to it.

Option 2:

• Keep it simple and reach people through messages(DM) and ads to get them on board and ready to start promoting. So brands can easily and quickly get started with the campaign.
• But the number of influencers on the platform will be very less.
• One benefit of this approach is I can find dominance in a niche market/location and grow bit by bit.
• Second benefit will be the relationship with the influencer and ability to pre-negotiate and keep everything ready.

Option 3 (cheating):

• Sign up to a already existing tool and start copying their user base.
• It is Just like option 1 but even more unethical but wouldn't mind doing it in the beginning to grow the user base.

I will greatly appreciate your inputs for this problem, also if you have experience building something like this (closest example will be something like upwork, fiverr)

I am not concerned about the technical knowledge required, cost, time or any other factor.