Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge)
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I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking I'm like, "If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone, right?" I certainly, you know, did that in my career. I think that's missing the point that we're humans, and I think sometimes we act in ways that are non-doministic or kind of 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 and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are, and invest more and hands-on tactics just to close those gaps more specifically. Today, my guest is Ben Lazier. Ben was VP of Product and Growth at Thumbtech, where he rebuilt the product team and Thumbtech's growth strategy, re-architected the revenue model, and helped 3X Thumbtech's growth within 3 years. Prior to Thumbtech, Ben was at Lyft for over 6 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 this time advising marketplace teams and founders, teaching a reforge course on marketplace growth, and most recently started a healthcare company called Neura 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 1/10th 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 podcast in April YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Ben Lazier. Ben, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. It's 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. How does that sound to you? That sounds amazing. That's a high bar, but I will try to lead up to your expectations. I have been confident we will hit that bar. Let me start with just setting a little context. And for folks that aren't super familiar with what is a marketplace business? They hear this term marketplace company. What's the simplest way to understand what makes a company a marketplace company and a marketplace business? I mean, like you mentioned, I love marketplaces. I think I've been building and scaling marketplaces for, I think, almost 15 years now. And I feel like the ad is such a fascinating dimension to the challenge that we work on as PMs. It's this hidden dimension that you get and uncover when you work on marketplaces. And I think on paper, what makes a marketplace is pretty straightforward. It's two or more sides that are distinct from one another, and they provide value to each other. And then you have an intermediary trying to facilitate that exchange of value in the middle. That's pretty simple explanation. I think in practice, it's always a little bit more nuanced on the fringes. You have all those interesting dimensions, like how involved is the intermediary defines how managed the marketplace is. Something like Craigslist is super heads off, unmanaged, and something like Lyft starts to be more into the semi managed where the platform significantly shapes the transaction in this exchange of value.
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