Benjamin Lauzier: belief

Transcript context

…So, just to spend a little more time there to make this even more real. So, you're saying that pre-product market fit, before you find that anyone really wants what you're building, focus on figuring out a way to grow one side of the marketplace. So, maybe just two quick follow up questions. How do you know which side to focus on initially? And can you give an example, I think Thumbtack may be a good example of this, of how they did that? Which side to focus on is there's different approaches to this, but generally people will pick the hardest side. And so, I'll take the example of Thumbtack, because we're going to talk about it. So, Thumbtack is a home services marketplace to help you find plumbers, electricians, and the harder side there was demand. There's supply, and you can look for, you can open the yellow pages, you can find plumbers somewhere, but the hardest question was can we go out there and can we find people who want to do something in their house, who have projects that need to be done? What is the core growth strategy for us to acquire those people, to find them? And what kind of retention can we create? Can we create a delightful experience for them to come back to our platform and want us to take care of their home for them? Pick the hardest side is my advice. And then, how some companies do this, again, I think there's a lot of different ways to do this, but a common advice is find a way to jumpstart one side. Find a way to hack one side, play one player mode is what it's also called sometimes, but try to find a way to tap into existing channels that have one side of your marketplace already latent. And so again, you have countless businesses that if you've been built off of Craigslist, I think Thumbtack was partially one of them, and the idea was like, "Hey, we can find all those great pros on Thumbtack. When we have someone who wants a job, 'Oh, you want your kitchen remodeled?' We can, behind the scenes, go and post a job on Craigslist and then we'll bring on all the contractors who are browsing Craigslist looking for jobs, we'll bring them to our platform." That's an example of how that you worry about the core value proposition of can we get people to come back to the platform? Can we create this delightful exchange of value? Are people trusting us? Do we have the right checks in place to make sure that you are hiring the right person? What will make you come back? And once that's done, then you can focus around how do I build a flywheel on the supply side, and how do I manage and how do I make sure I have enough plumbers per market, or something like that. When you say find the hard side, how do you find that? Any advice you can give founders and teams?…

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