Benjamin Lauzier: belief

Transcript context

…Awesome. Are there any examples of companies you've seen that are just like, that will never work as a marketplace, or here's a funny example of a marketplace that tried to be a marketplace and it's not ... I don't have a great example of that, but I can give you a tangentially related example of a marketplace that I don't want to throw anyone under the bus. I respect the company and the effort, but Sidecar at the time was another ride-sharing company competing with Lyft and Uber, and there's, I'm sure a whole bunch of lessons there. They ended up closing, but I think one really interesting direction that they took pretty early on to differentiate themselves was, in my mind perhaps very naively a mistake, they decided to give complete control to the user where as a user you had a whole bunch of filters. You could decide, "I want a car that's at least 2015 or newer. I want a driver that's at least this or newer." And so, I think the theory was reasonable on paper. It was like, "Hey, let's give people more control over it." But you have those other players out there, you have Lyft and Uber, and people feel forced in this standardized experience, "We're going to compete by giving you the choice, you get to decide the experience that you want." I think in reality, it just fragments your marketplace even further, and you have this hyper fragmentation in your marketplace, and I think it hurt their SLAs quite drastically. If you think about the ETA, when you ask explicitly you're like, "Yeah, sure, I want a newer car," and you slide it to 2020 not realizing that you just lost 10 minutes because now we had a great driver, but they have a Honda Civic from 2018, and it's not the special that you wanted. So, I think people who build marketplaces tend to want to give a lot of control to the users because this is what users want, or this is what comes up oftentimes in user feedback like, "Oh, we have those two distinct group of users. Those ones, they really want new cars. Those ones, they don't want new cars." And so, naturally you have a product team that builds the toggle to get the new cars, and I think the mistake is that you unknowingly fragment your supply in a way that has a much more meaningful impact on the health of your marketplace than you suspect. I think this is another awesome example of don't over listen to users and do what you think is going to be best for the business, and this is not even a marketplace lesson. It's just generally you don't want to give users more options than they will need to be successful and happy. And I think Sidecar did that because they were trying to differentiate from Lyft and Uber, like, "What can we do differently?" And they're like, "Oh, let's give people all these options." I think they even let drivers choose the price that they're offering their ride at, which made it extra complicated. They're like, "Oh my God, all these cars at different prices," but I respect their attempt because they were just the third wheel, no pun intended.…

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