How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack)

I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, "If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for- for everyone," right? I certainly, you know, did that in my career. I think, um, that's missing the point that we're humans, and I think sometimes we act in ways that are non-deterministic, uh, or counter-intuitive. But my take is I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment. So provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality, and provide the right coaching, uh, and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are and invest more in hands-on tactics just to close those gaps more specifically.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Ben Loiseau. Ben was VP of product and growth at Thumbtack, where he rebuilt the product team and Thumbtack's growth strategy, re-architected the revenue model, and helped 3X Thumbtack's growth within three years. Prior to Thumbtack, Ben was at Lyft for over six years where he was employee number 30 and led product and growth for the driver's side of the business, and at one point reached 1% of US workers driving for Lyft every month. He currently spends his time advising marketplace teams and founders, teaching Reforge course on marketplace growth, and most recently started a healthcare company called Noora that connects you to a care advocate to help you navigate the healthcare system in the US. In our conversation, we go many layers deep on the many key elements of building and scaling a marketplace business, including what to focus on pre product-market fit, how to know which side of the marketplace to prioritize, what product-market fit looks like, how to track liquidity, what causes most marketplaces to fail and how to avoid that, and a bunch of examples of really clever growth strategies, especially on the supply side, and some really interesting stories about how Lyft was able to compete with Uber early on with one-tenth of the resources. As a bonus, Ben also shares insights into how the European product market is different from the US product market and what he encourages European companies to change in order to operate more effectively and be more innovative. This episode is for anyone building or thinking about building a marketplace business. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Ben Loiseau. (instrumental music) Ben, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. So good to be here. Thanks for having me.

It's absolutely my pleasure. Okay, so you are one of the most knowledgeable and experienced product leaders in the world on building and scaling a marketplace company, and so I want to spend the bulk of our time talking about and essentially extracting as much wisdom out of your brain on how to build and scale a marketplace business so that founders and teams that are struggling with building their marketplace company or just thinking about building a marketplace business can save a lot of time and a lot of pain. Uh, how does that sound to you?