Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Ironically, it's almost the opposite advice that I usually give to companies who struggle with market health, it's if you have different verticals, try if possible to open up your supply walls. Your user is telling you like X, but try to give them something that is tangential to what you think they want, because odds are that they are actually fine with it. There's this amazing example from Thumbtack, it's the smoke machine example. So Thumbtack, now they specialize a little bit more in home services, but a few years ago they were also doing a lot of events. So, you had DJs, you had photographers, and a lot of people were hiring for wedding DJs on the platform. And one of the checkboxes was a smoke machine, and it turns out a lot of people are checking this. You're like, "Yeah, hell yeah, I want a smoke machine at my wedding." And unknowingly to them, obviously, only 5% of our DJs had a smoke machine, and so you would carve out 95% of our supply. And if when we talked to users, they were like, "Oh, no, no, I don't care that much about the smoke machine. I didn't realize that this was automatically going to remove half of the supply." And so, work on ways to make this checkbox affect the ranking but not the actual filtering is a great example of how you can listen to your users and tweak the experience, but simplify their cognitive load by knowing like, "Hey, we know you prefer a smoke machine, but we're intelligent enough to know it's probably not a deal breaker for you." I love that example. The other thing that I think is important to talk about briefly is when you're thinking about building a marketplace, a lot of times they fail because the business model just doesn't work. I think about a company like Cherry that tried to do Uber for car washes, and in theory there's a smart idea of I'm going to just do on-demand car wash. The problem is no one's going to pay what it costs to do that, to a car wash person shows up and washes your car. I think cleaning is another example. There's also just like going- Exec is another one that comes to mind.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.