Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)

When the CDC mandated face masks in early April 2020, that's when essentially we went to sleep one day with our typical April traffic, typical April sales, and then it was Black Friday overnight. And in part because nobody knew where to find face masks. Our sellers are incredibly astute businesspeople, and, you know, if you had been making wedding dresses, and you know how to sew and you've got material and you've got a bit of time, making a mask is, is quite a simple task. And so we just saw this huge surge of, of demand, and then supply rising to meet it. And we, we did something that as far as I know we've never done in Etsy's past which is, we put out a call to our sellers to say, "Now's the time. Now's the time to make face masks if you can." And so it felt like this is our time to shine, to really help sellers continue to make sales, to help buyers find this critical item that they were looking for. And then from there, things kept going. And, and we really worked hard to make sure that the story was not just about face masks for our buyers, that they understood that Etsy's a place for so many different categories and so many different items.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Tim Hawley. Tim is VP of Product at Etsy, where he's been for over 10 years, and has helped grow Etsy from around 500 million in GMV to over 13 billion in GMV. This episode is for anyone working on marketplace or looking for ideas to increase growth, or looking for advice on how to change your internal culture. We get into the big cultural transition that Etsy went through that took them to the next level, lots of examples of product changes that helped them with conversion, acquisition and retention, plus how Etsy organizes their teams, things about supply versus demand dynamics, how Etsy got started with growing their initial supply and also their initial demand, plus a bunch of frameworks and hiring advice, and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Tim Hawley after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by ProductRoadmap.ai and Ignition. ProductRoadmap.ai is the first AI roadmapping suite. It helps ensure roadmaps drive revenue by instantly aligning product with your sales and marketing teams to capture upsell opportunities. Built by early leaders from Rippling and Craft, it automatically identifies feature gaps from your CRM data, and your customer conversations, adds them to shareable roadmaps easily prioritized by revenue impact, and then seamlessly closes the loop with sales reps via targeted notifications when feature gaps are closed. As part of Ignition's broader go-to-market operating system, ProductRoadmap.ai can also help create better handoffs and collaboration with product marketing teams by giving both teams the tools to research, plan, orchestrate, and measure the process of building products and going to market. Packed with integrations, AI automation, and communication tools, it's truly a one-stop shop for product and marketing to bring things from concept to launch. To sign up, go to ProductRoadmap.ai and use promo code Lenny to get 75% off your first year. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential. But there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools, or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform, where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics, and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Eppo supports tests on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at GetE-P-P-O.com. That's GetEppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. (instrumental music) Tim, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.