Benjamin Lauzier
Former VP of Product & Growth at Thumbtack / Lyft
Former VP of Product and Growth at Thumbtack where he 3X'd growth in three years; employee #30 at Lyft where he led driver-side product and growth reaching 1% of US workers driving monthly; now advises marketplace founders and teaches marketplace growth at Reforge.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Benjamin Lauzier draws from his experience as employee #30 at Lyft and VP of Product/Growth at Thumbtack to provide a comprehensive guide to building and scaling marketplace businesses. He covers pre-product-market-fit priorities, how to choose which marketplace side to focus on, tracking liquidity, supply-side growth strategies, and why most marketplaces fail, emphasizing the importance of market forces and empowerment over top-down control.
Leadership Principles
- → Provide guardrails for quality, coaching and tools for supply to succeed, then step back — believe in market forces over top-down control
- → When running a marketplace, resist the ivory tower of stats and remember you're dealing with humans who act non-deterministically
- → Pre-product-market-fit, focus relentlessly on one side of the marketplace — the one that's hardest to get
Notable Quotes
"When you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower looking at stats thinking, 'If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone.' That's missing the point that we're humans, and sometimes we act in ways that are non-deterministic or counterintuitive."
— On the danger of over-relying on data in marketplace management
"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."
— On his philosophy for managing marketplace supply
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