Benjamin Lauzier: belief

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay, so let's come back to that, because that's a really important topic and it's something that every marketplace trends towards or thinks about is just like we're going to control the supply, we're going to manage it, we're going to maybe own it in the future, but let's get back to that. So, you work with a ton of marketplaces, you've built a bunch of marketplaces. What do you find is the biggest struggle to building a successful marketplace business? The most common problem people run into. I think there's two types of challenges, I guess there's when you're talking about creating a marketplace, and then there's when you're talking about scaling a marketplace. For creating a marketplace, I see many founders that are pre-product market fit, super eager to nerd out on marketplace dynamics. They're super excited to launch a marketplace, we all are, and they want to talk about supply and demand, they want to look at all kinds of ratios. They show me economic papers and ask, "How could we apply this principle to my company?" And here, my advice is generally always, "If you don't have product market fit, and if you don't have a good enough growth strategy for at least one side of your marketplace, just forget about all this marketplace stuff." Focus on this core exchange of value, go deep with one side of the marketplace and see if you can rely on some crutch, some hack for the other side for time being. And you see companies like Airbnb and Thumbtack doing this with Craigslist pretty early on to jumpstart their growth as just countless examples, but don't get distracted by this shiny and cool intellectually challenging idea of working on the marketplace, and nail the basics of your product market fit at first. 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?…

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