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

**Benjamin Lauzier** (0:00)
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 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-deterministic or counterintuitive. 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 in hands-on tactics just to close those gaps more specifically.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:47)
Today, my guest is Ben Lauzier. 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 3 years. Prior to Thumbtack, 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 his time advising marketplace teams and founders, teaching a Reforge course on marketplace growth, and most recently started a healthcare company called Nurra 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 Lauzier.
Ben, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Benjamin Lauzier** (2:29)
Thank you so much. It's so good to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:32)
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?

**Benjamin Lauzier** (3:03)
That sounds amazing. That's a high bar, but I will try to live up to your expectations.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:07)
I am 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 is the simplest way to understand what makes a company a marketplace company and a marketplace business?

**Benjamin Lauzier** (3:24)
Like you mentioned, I love marketplaces. I think I have been building and scaling marketplaces for almost 15 years now. I feel like they add such a fascinating dimension to the challenge that we work on as PMs. It's this hidden dimension that you 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 a 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 hands-off, unmanaged. And something like Lyft starts to be more into the semi-managed, where the platform significantly shapes the transaction and this exchange of value. So I think that's how I see it, but there's all those fascinating variations of marketplaces, I guess.