市场平台如何取胜:流动性、增长杠杆、质量等 | Benjamin Lauzier(Lyft、Thumbtack)
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack)
Full Interview Transcript
Benjamin Lauzier: I think when you’re running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, “If only we could get people to do X, it’d be better for everyone.” 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: 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 three years. Prior to Thumbtack, Ben was at Lyft for over six 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 U.S. workers driving for Lyft every month. He currently spends his time advising marketplace teams and founders, teaching a reforged 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
What is a Marketplace
Benjamin Lauzier: Thank you so much, so good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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?
Tackle the Hardest Side First
Benjamin Lauzier: That sounds amazing. That’s a high bar, but I will try to live up to your expectations.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m 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’s the simplest way to understand what makes a company a marketplace company and a marketplace business?
Liquidity: Key to Winning
Benjamin Lauzier: I mean, like you mentioned, I love marketplaces. I think I’ve been building and scaling marketplaces for I think almost 15 years now, and I feel like they add just such a fascinating dimension to the challenge that we work on as PMs, and 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. So, that’s 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. So, 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 in this exchange of value. So, I think that’s how I see it, but there’s all those fascinating variations of marketplaces, I guess.
Lenny Rachitsky:
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You’ve mentioned managed marketplaces and just how that becomes something marketplaces start to think about more, I want to get back to that because a really important point. But just to even clarify this point, a key part of a marketplace is that the company doesn’t own the supply. That’s in a sense what defines their marketplace versus they’re just selling stuff.
Predicting Liquidity with Health Metrics
Benjamin Lauzier: Totally. Yes, yes. And I think again, you have companies that claim to be managed marketplaces, I think depending on how you want to look, with investors perhaps, you’ll pick one angle or the other, but that’s where you get into gray waters. But yeah, the marketplace implies this concept of two independent and supposedly autonomous parties that you help connect and provide this exchange of value for them.
The Dynamics of Liquidity and Supply
Lenny Rachitsky: 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.
Benjamin Lauzier: 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.
Determining Product-Market Fit
Lenny Rachitsky: 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?
When Marketplaces Are a Good Model
Benjamin Lauzier: 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: When you say find the hard side, how do you find that? Any advice you can give founders and teams?
The Cost of Too Much Control
Benjamin Lauzier: In general, I would say intuitively the teams know, especially the teams are in the weeds, they know. They know, “Well, yeah, we can get X. But what we really struggle with is getting students to look at this.” That’s your sign. And I think sometimes it takes someone else to make you think about it, to reflect like, “Actually, yes, you’re right. This side is obvious. We know how to get it, we just don’t have the right supply for it and we don’t know where to find the supply.” Boom, that’s the side that you should be focused on. Then you find a way to add source to demand, subsidize it, find some other way, and focus on this side that you have no idea how to grow. You should have a reliable growth strategy for the side.
Common Reasons Marketplaces Fail
Lenny Rachitsky: In my experience, it’s almost always the supply side is what you need to work on, because once you have awesome supply, people are going to be really excited to tap it. Like Uber drivers, Airbnb homes, professionals on Thumbtack. Is that your experience too?
The Intentionality of Quality Control
Benjamin Lauzier: Yes. I would say supply is the hardest side maybe like 80% to 90% of the time. Yeah, I totally agree. I was trying to think of counter examples, but I can’t think of one. I just know that there are.
The Managed Marketplace Dilemma
Lenny Rachitsky: There’s one I know, which is Rover, based on research I did, because it turned out it was really easy to find people who want to walk dogs and watch dogs for 50 bucks an hour or whatever. It was a very easy value prop, and so they had a waitlist, they had just so many people. Also, TaskRabbit is the one I know about where they had so many people wanting to be taskers, whatever they call them-
Benjamin Lauzier: I was going to mention TaskRabbit as well. I heard of that as well, yeah.
Improving Quality Without Managed Services
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And then you talked about there’s a core part of figuring out how to grow that part, how to grow the hard part, generally the supply side. You shared a couple examples. Are there any more clever things you recall that you might be able to share of just ways people grew supply early on that could inspire people that are trying to figure this out right now?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of common tactics I would say pretty early on that I think companies rely on. So, we’ve talked about jump-starting one side of the marketplace with, it may be with Thumbtack and Lyft, also leverage job boards. You have also a lot of companies building value added services pretty early on as a core way of retaining supply pretty early on. Like let’s build a really compelling basket of value for this supply, and this is going to be the thing that appeals everyone. So, OpenTable did this really well with all the restaurant services, other things that I’ve seen people use really well early on or converting your supply into demand or demand into supply pretty early on, so Lyft, we tried that. It actually didn’t work at Lyft, but I know other marketplaces have been pretty successful with that.
Mentor and Ambassador Programs
Lenny Rachitsky: Just to make sure people understand that one, it’s a really interesting one is, in the Lyft example would be convincing drivers to become riders, convincing riders to become drivers, and mostly the latter, convincing riders to become drivers.
From Mentor to Recruiter Programs
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, exactly. In our case at Lyft early on, we had a waitlist on the demand side because we just couldn’t onboard enough supply. And so, we had this idea of having a pop-up. Instead of saying no drivers available, it would be like, “Hey, sorry, all the drivers are taken. People are making 50 bucks an hour right now, do you want to hop on your car and drive?” And we had some conversions, but it felt a little distracting to the overall experience and it wasn’t a huge driver of supply. But I know that for Uber it actually was. I think they had a relatively meaningful amount of supply coming from [inaudible 00:15:27]
Looking Back at Lyft vs Uber
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, how does that make you feel that Uber figured out a better way to approach this and made it work? That doesn’t feel-
Benjamin Lauzier: And it’s a different audience. You would think that the Lyft passenger and driver is more likely to flip back and forth between the two. I don’t know, I don’t know. [inaudible 00:15:47]
Building Products in Europe
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, a PM at Uber outdid you guys. Oh, no.
Benjamin Lauzier: Yes, on a couple of other things.
Equity Culture and French Startups
Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting.
Benjamin Lauzier: And we outdid them on a few other things [inaudible 00:15:55]
Roots of Cultural Differences
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, okay. That’s right. So, essentially what we’ve been spending some time on here is just when you’re starting a marketplace, figure out which side you need to drive, because that’s what will unlock this opportunity. There’s a hard thing that nobody’s ever done before, and most of the time it’s build a bunch of supply that nobody has done before, and there’s all these tactics to do that. And all of this is, as you coming back to the main question I asked, we’ve gone on this awesome tangent, is pre-product market fit before you even know this is a thing. Spend time most of the time building supply to see if demand, customers actually want this thing. Right?
Benjamin Lauzier: Exactly. And then I think there’s a different set of challenges. The other pitfall that I see is, so pre-product market fit, people tend to be distracted by those marketplace dynamics like we talked about instead of doing what we just talked about. For companies that have some sort of scale and product market fit, to me the place where I see people getting tripped up most often is the concept of marketplace liquidity or how to match the health of a marketplace. To me, liquidity is how marketplaces win. It’s this measure of your ability to match buyers and sellers efficiently, it’s how quickly and efficiently people can find what they’re looking for on your platform. So, you can picture a Venn diagram. One circle is this is what supply wants to sell, and another circle is this is what demand wants to buy, and your liquidity is the overlap between those two circles.
So for, let’s take the example of Lyft or Uber, because we talked about them. It might be for all the people who open the app with the intention to book a ride, how many of those actually turn into a ride? And this metric liquidity, it’s a direct multiplier on the efficiency of your marketplace. It’s literally at the center of your vision, it’s why you exist as a marketplace is to connect the two. And it’s also the ultimate engagement loop. The more supply you have, the more choice people have, the better the services, the more likely it is that it turns into a transaction and the more likely it is that they come back. And so, it’s really this incredible circle. And what I see is people missing how critical this component is in the marketplace, struggle to define it for the business, and most importantly struggle to build an actionable playbook against it. Like, “Okay, how do I manage this? Okay, it’s important, but what do I do about it?” Basically.
Advice for European Companies
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a metric you recommend people specifically look at to understand liquidity?
Benjamin Lauzier: I think the metric that I like the most is a predictor of liquidity. So your liquidity might be, it’s typically a measure of demand utilization. It might be looking for something on there, maybe how many of those searches with intent actually turn into a transaction. So, it’s your field rate of your intentful demand typically, and that’s really indicative of the net output of your marketplace. And so, that gives you a sense of the health of your marketplace, but it can be influenced by a whole bunch of different factors. So, if you think about for Thumbtack, it can be influenced by if there’s a snowstorm out there, if the competition is bidding, there’s a whole bunch of exogenous factors that come into play. And the metric that I think is slightly more actionable is a little harder to define, but so much more helpful in my opinion.
It’s what I call a market health metric, and this is basically think of your proxy that is the best predictor of your liquidity. So, I’ll use the example of Lyft. You have your liquidity is your demand utilization, it’s how many app opens turn into a ride, and what predicts this? What will predict you and deciding to book a ride? For Lyft and for Uber, it was ETAs. So, we knew that if the closest driver was at least two minutes away from you or closer, then we had hit a ceiling, you were more than X person likely to convert and book a ride. If it’s more than two minutes, if it’s five, then maybe you check at Uber, maybe you walk, maybe you take the bus. If it’s two minutes, it doesn’t make a big enough difference, you’re just going to book the ride anyway.
So find this threshold, find this predictor that tends to plateau that correlates strongly with retention but with also the transaction happening, and that’s the metric that you can predict. That’s a metric that’s so much more actionable for teams to work against. If you’re a supply team now you can think of, “Okay, I’m adding 100 supplies into the platform. I want to know if it’s actually reducing ETAs in this case,” or I can look at correlations like this and limiting some of the effect of those exhaustive factors that I mentioned.
Benjamin’s Current Startup Venture
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. So, essentially watch fill rate is the term used that a lot of people love, which is just people with intent converting. So, the Airbnb example is exactly the way we did Airbnb is we looked at people that are searching with dates as intentful users, and then how many of them convert to a booking. So, that’s basically what you’re trying to get to, and your point here is that’s kind of the output metric. That’s what you want to move, but in order to move it, there’s something that is the biggest lever to moving fill rate. And in your experience, and I’ve seen this exact same thing, it’s usually amount of supply. Do you have enough good supply? And so, in the case of Lyft is do you have enough cars? Do you have enough homes, do you have enough plumbers on Thumbtack? And that’s usually where you can actually impact fill rate. Sweet.
Entrepreneurial Journey and Nurra Health
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, exactly.
Rapid Fire Questions
Lenny Rachitsky: And that becomes the goal of the team, that becomes the focus of the company, basically drive that up in all the little markets you’re in and all the categories you’re in.
Benjamin Lauzier: Exactly. Yeah, completely.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. You mentioned this idea of product market fit and the things change, pre-product market fit, post-product market fit. Classic question, I’m curious if you have any insights here, just what tells you that you’ve climbed that hill of product market fit, that you might have product market fit, or you definitely have product market fit in a marketplace?
Benjamin Lauzier: It’s hard because to me, the two are most independent. Maybe this is a hot take, but I feel like product market fit is independent of your marketplace dynamics. You might have a great product, and it provides amazing value to both sides, but you have yet to crack the flywheel on the supply side for how to bring those people. You don’t have the right product channel fit, for example. And so, this will have a massive impact on the dynamics of your marketplace. And so, to me, my answer would tend to be pretty classical, it would be like measure your product market fit the way you would for a normal company. So yeah, it’s a bit of an art more than the science, but I like the classic if we were to take this product away, what percentage of users would be significantly disappointed or have no other solution?
So, questions like this I think go to the heart of how valuable is your solution to users, and you can do this on the supply side and the demand side. I think here my advice is typically to consider that you have two product market fits essentially. You want to make sure that you have a compelling enough value proposition on both sides of the marketplace, and very often at the beginning you find product market fit on the demand side, but you realize it’s not compelling enough for your suppliers because your margins are too high or something like that. So, realizing that you have both those things, but I think you can measure them in a way that’s relatively traditional, and that’s independent of marketplace dynamics.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. We actually just had Sean Ellis on the podcast talking about that exact survey, the Sean Ellis test of asking people how disappointed would you be if they left, if the product didn’t exist. And I just love that you keep coming back to this point that I 100% agree with, that most of the challenges you have with a marketplace business, 90% are the same challenges you’ll have with a non-marketplace business. And people over-focus on, “Oh, I need to think of this like a marketplace, and all the marketplace science behind all this stuff.” And really it’s all the same stuff every founder is dealing with product market fit, except you have two sides of it growth strategy, but you have two sides of it. So, I love that you keep going back to that.
Something that I definitely want to touch on is when people are thinking about starting a marketplace company, what are signals that a marketplace is a good model for the idea? Because I think a lot of people come into and be like, “I want to build a marketplace. Oh, I’m going to connect these two sides. It’s going to be great,” and there’s no marketplace in this business, in this vertical. What are signs that marketplace dynamic and a business model is right for an idea versus no, it’s not?
Benjamin Lauzier: No one ever say like, “Oh, I’m going to build Airbnb for X,” it’s not something that people say. I think the signs that come to mind are one, higher fragmentation. I think you want this long tail of buyers and sellers without a handful of big players controlling the market, because this is where you can provide value by doing this job of aggregation. I think you also want a relatively uniform set of needs. That means that it can be, like your supply can be commoditized to some extent. This is what’s so tricky, by the way, about services, service marketplaces like Thumbtack, because unlike eBay, where sellers, they just want to sell very clear and distinct inventory, on Thumbtack you have electricians who only want certain types of jobs, but they only want it if they’re available that day. And they might take a job and cancel it because something better comes up.
And so, this makes for a very fuzzy definition of supply, and you have very different set of needs. One electrician wants something, the other one has a very different perception of the same unit of demand, and that makes it very, very difficult. So, it’s feasible, but I would say that is not a compelling attribute for building a marketplace. So, a relatively uniform set of needs. And the last one I’d mention is a high enough bearer in the matchmaking or the creation. I think how hard it is for people to find each other today, and how much effort do they have to put in to vet each other, I think is another great sign. The higher it is, the bigger the opportunity because it means you come in, implement the right processes to simplify this exchange of value.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I’d love to know if there’s any examples you can think of, of bad marketplace ideas that people have tried, but I’ll summarize the three points you just made, which I love. So, these are signs that this is a great opportunity for marketplace business, that there’s a lot of fragmentation on both sides. There’s not just a small number of companies or customers on one side or the other, because if there are, why do they need you? There’s five airlines or whatever, you don’t need a marketplace to match with an airline. Then two is there’s uniform needs, the needs are basically consistent. I just want to stay in a home, I want a car to take me somewhere, I want a plumber.
And then there’s a barrier, there’s complexity to the matchmaking and helping someone book the thing, work with them. Finding a car, I imagine is like, I’m not going to just flag down a car. There’s challenge there. I’m not going to just go and ask someone, “Can I stay in your home?” There’s challenges there.
Benjamin Lauzier: Exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 …
Benjamin Lauzier: 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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.
Benjamin Lauzier: 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.”
Lenny Rachitsky: 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-
Benjamin Lauzier: Exec is another one that comes to mind.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh Exec, yeah, where it’s just like someone come does stuff for you.
Benjamin Lauzier: Something, yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. And so I guess, is there anything you want to add there? Just like this is another reason your marketplace might fail? And maybe just let me expand on this question. Just what are the most common reasons marketplaces fail in your experience? And I think it’s important to say most marketplace ideas fail, just like most startup ideas fail.
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, most ideas period fail, I think. Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Most ideas period fail, same. Coming back to most of the things you’re going to struggle with are the same things that every company struggles with outside of marketplace. So, let me just ask, is maybe specifically within marketplaces or even just broadly, what are the biggest reasons that marketplaces fail?
Benjamin Lauzier: I think a few things come to mind. One is this concept of liquidity that we’ve talked about. So, you need to kick off this flywheel, you need to build enough of that density within your marketplace. And depending on the business, you can take a lot of time or money, and without the right diagnostic framework you can end up running out of both. And so it’s like, that’s the same one, and I felt this at Lyft, I’ve seen this at other companies, this rush like, “Wow, we have to get to this point, otherwise we know it’s a losing battle until we have enough density for both sides to have a good enough experience.” The other one that I see is ignoring one side. So, we talked about doing that when you’re early on, but I see a lot of larger companies operating for too long as one-sided businesses. Many large marketplaces only thinking about their demand side funnel.
So they run ads, they get clicks, they turn those clicks into dollars, and they try to get enough supplies that intuitively the experience is good enough for users. And my advice is, if you’re doing this you’re missing out on half of your business. And the trick is marketplaces are very laggy, so once your network effects start to die down it turns into this moment of panic of, “Oh shoot, we forgot about half of our users. We forgot that sellers are people too, and they’re all leaving, and now we need to completely transform our product to save the ship, and to create a compelling value proposition on their side.” So, that’s the other thing that I see is businesses realizing that they are marketplaces with true marketplace needs too late in the game. And the last one is quality. I think we talked a little bit about the quality before, but it doesn’t mean that you always need to have the best quality in your marketplace, but being a marketplace implies a level of curation.
You need to be intentional about the quality that you aim to provide, and I think a lot of companies don’t have necessarily that intentionality and you have this constant push of supply, “If only we’d lower our bar a little bit, we could get more supply.” And so until you end up, we’ve all experienced this at some point, you found some e-commerce website, you look for something and there is also like, “Oh my god, this looks super shady,” because all the sellers don’t look that great. That’s a quality problem. And so, you need to be intentional about your quality and I think that’s another area where companies fail.
Lenny Rachitsky:
Kind of as a segue from that idea of quality, I want to talk about managed marketplaces, managed supply. So, I think the reason quality is such an issue for marketplaces is because you do not own the supply and control the supply your marketplace, you’re not just selling something, quality is innately going to be a challenge. Airbnb doesn’t own homes, Uber doesn’t employee drivers. They can’t even legally tell them exactly what to do because their contractors, so quality is always this ongoing challenge with marketplaces. So, there’s always this push towards making it more of a managed marketplace. We give people a lot more instruction, maybe they own some of the supply, maybe they invest a lot in training, all that kind of stuff. And in a perfect world, not unlike an idealized world, quality will be best if you own it. But then you’re no longer marketplace, your business model sucks. I guess just any thoughts on marketplaces that are considering becoming more managed? Any advice on when it makes sense to move towards that spectrum, and how far to go?
Benjamin Lauzier: I think when you’re running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit looking at stats and thinking, “If only we could get people to do X, it’d be better for everyone.” And 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 intuitive. I’ll mention another example, but we’d originally sell leads to pros like plumbers and electricians. And of those leads, obviously only a fraction would turn into actual jobs and revenue for those pros. So, we also saw that those pros were always great at converting leads into jobs. And so, naturally we thought that we could provide a more consistent experience for customers and for pros by improving their ROI and selling bookings directly to those pros. It’s a common marketplace move, going from some version of lead to a direct booking.
And digital, great. We knew we were going to improve their ROI by something like 20% maybe, and we launched this and pros hated it. They hated it because they actually subconsciously, they liked the thrill of the sale. They loved this contact with customer, and they sometimes completely overestimated their ability to close the customer. They were like, “You took all those phone calls, they kept me busy. I felt like I was hustling, I was about to close this customer.” And so, no matter what the data says of like, “Oh, we increased their earnings by 20%,” the pros don’t feel this way and it’s the right to feel however they want. And we saw the same thing at Lyft when trying to make driver earnings less volatile, we had to fight a lot of that perception and a lot of that peak end effect. So, my call-out here is any attempt at control can be really tricky and backfire in ways that are unpredictable.
You also touched on employment classification. In the U.S., when you talk about controlling supply, all the lawyers are like, “No, no, no, that’s not something that we do.” Because if you control your supply, then there can be legally classified as employees and be entitled to a whole bunch of benefits. So, my take on this in general is I’m a huge believer, and it really depends on the type of company I should say, obviously, 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.
So, lots of coaching tools that Lyft, Uber did it, like most marketplaces provide some sort of coaching. You have a review system perhaps, you have stars for your sellers, for sellers who fall below the threshold then coach them, provide them the right tools, the right guidance, what is the standard that you have on your marketplace and help them meet that bar. And for people who fall through the gaps that you have, then that’s when you invest in more hands-on tools. And this is one of the things that we did at Lyft also with the rental company that we spent up. I’m happy to tell you more about that, that’s interesting.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’d love to hear about that. Before we hear that, is there any marketplace that has been very good at upleveling quality without becoming managed, that did this really well that you can think of?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, there’s a talent marketplace called Toptal, and they are specialized in this. They have a really high bar for quality, they claim to only have the top 1%, top 3% I believe, of talent there. And they have a really amazing set of checks and processes. This funny story from them, but apparently they advertise something maybe a 3% pass rate for their talent, so they only on board like 3% of the people who apply. And allegedly their actual pass rate is even lower than that, but they thought that if they actually advertise the actual number it would sound fake. And so, they actually say 3% because 1% would sound like too ridiculous and it would discredit their talent. So, they’re one company that does a tremendous amount of work for vetting quality early on with a ton of different checks, but also maintaining that quality. So, throughout with the right coaching tools, with education and things like that.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s a really good example. And so, basically they just vet and only approve high quality supply in their case. It’s mostly engineers, right? I think on Toptal?
Benjamin Lauzier: Correct. Yes, it’s mostly engineers, designers, I think.
Lenny Rachitsky: Which you can only do if you have so much supply that has so much interest in becoming part of your platform, but that’s a really cool example. Basically it’s just only allow really high quality supply. Let’s hear this rental car story, so this is Lyft trying to do rental cars, right?
Benjamin Lauzier: Correct. Yes, yes. Yeah, so this is a little bit of context. I was leading the driver’s side of product at Lyft, and General Motors had invested half a billion dollars in our last round of funding. And this was Christmas Eve, I’ll always remember, I got a call from Lyft CEO and General Motors CTO, and we decided to build a rental company essentially. And the reason for it was really fascinating. GM had all those vehicles that were coming off of lease, and that they were forced to sell at auctions they didn’t really know what to do with. And from our perspective, we had this massive supply gap. We’ve talked about this before, but we had this huge supply crunch, we were growing super fast and couldn’t hire drivers fast enough, couldn’t onboard drivers fast enough. And when we looked at the market, we realized that 50% of the job seekers and welfare recipients in the U.S. don’t have a car.
So, that was our supply gap. This was a huge pool of people that we just couldn’t tap into because they didn’t have a car. And so, by renting cars we could essentially manufacture our own supply. We could dial this up and down, we could be very surgical about how many vehicles do we bring in, which markets do we bring this in, at what price? We could even offer to pay for the car if they drove 30 hours a week and completely transform the lives of those people, now we allow them to have true mobility. They can go buy groceries, they can go take the kids on vacation. So, a huge win-win for everybody with something like this. And I think in few months we had built a rental company from the ground up, and within 18 months I think we were the fourth-largest rental fleet in the U.S.
But all of this stemmed from this gap that we saw of like, okay, it’s not about controlling the drivers in general. It’s about like, okay, we want to be surgical. We want to control the quality of the cars on the platform. So, we talked about that, that’s a great example. In the markets where we thought the vehicles of quality was too low, we knew we could onboard more rental vehicles that were more recent to raise the average age of a vehicle on the platform. So, it gave us more control in a much more surgical way, I guess.
Lenny Rachitsky: So, it’s not that you are launching a rental car service, the idea was add supply and give drivers a car so that they could become drivers.
Benjamin Lauzier: It was a bit of both. We actually launched, it was we had vehicles that drivers could rent from Lyft, and to drive on the platform, and also to drive for their personal needs essentially. But yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Got it, okay. And then, did this actually work and have impact? Was this a good idea?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah. Yeah, it had a tremendous impact. Like I mentioned, I think we scaled this exponentially to become, I think again, the fourth-largest rental fleet in the U.S. because it was so effective for us, both because we had the right amount of control, but also those drivers were incredibly loyal to us. We had a whole bunch of other incentives that we could do, we could offer to pay for the car but only if you don’t drive for the competition for Uber, and only if you drive at least 30 hours a week. So, this again provided us with, again, much greater retention, much higher engagement, and was a real incentive for us but also for the drivers.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. And maybe the reason it’s most interesting is this is along the spectrum of a managed marketplace. It moves closer to you guys are paying and covering costs of cars. It makes it less just like this simple, highly efficient marketplace.
Benjamin Lauzier: Exactly, yeah. It’s the marketplace version of maybe your black car fleet owner has their fleet of vehicle and they have people. So, this was the marketplace version of doing that.
Lenny Rachitsky: And it’s also just a differentiator, because GM and you guys were close, and so you had this lever that say Uber didn’t have. Amazing. Another area that I know you spent time on that I think is really interesting, and I think it’d be helpful to people to hear is the mentorship program, and the ambassador program that you had at Lyft, and how that helped you scale much more quickly than other folks were able to. Can you share that story?
Benjamin Lauzier: Pretty early on at Lyft, this was 2014, 2015 maybe, Uber was basically 30X our size. They had 30 times more revenue, more people, more liquidity, everything you can think of. They were growing like crazy, and we had a bit of this existential moment, as you can imagine, where we were wondering how we’re supposed to compete with that. And we had to be super clever, everything that you did at the company had to be 10 times more efficient per person than the competition just to survive. That was the bar, just not to die, and put a lot of pressure on us but we basically found a clever way of onboarding drivers at a fraction of the cost and resources. So, let me give you a little bit of context on how the onboarding flow worked. So, at the time, the last step to get onboarded as a driver was after you background check and your driving record check came back, you had to do a visual inspection of your car, a quick test drive, some light training, and we would check your documents.
We would check that you are the person with a driver’s license and all those things. And Uber at the time would launch a team on the ground, they would go and open an office and they would have DMV-style group onboarding sessions and car inspections. And we did this as well in our first three to four markets, but you can imagine the overhead and the lead time. You had to go and you had to find office space, sign the lease, hire employees, you had huge, huge lead time. And we thought about it, and at the time a huge competitive differentiator for us was our brand. As a passenger or as a driver, why would you use a platform with lower liquidity? As a driver, you had lower earnings guaranteed. As a passenger, you had longer wait times. Why would you use a service like that? You do because of the brand, because of its values, it’s how it makes you feel.
And so, we had the pink mustaches at the time, we had this very strong brand identity. I think a lot of that has been lost now, but we also had this amazing community of drivers who were fierce advocates for the brand. And so, what we did is leveraging this community and building essentially a soft onboarding supply engine where we would pay our best drivers $35 per mentor session, and a mentor session was essentially replacing this onboarding flow. So, it was basically another driver looking at your vehicle to check all your documents, take photos of your driver’s license and all that stuff, and take you on a short ride along. And the benefits of this were absolutely mind-blowing and kind of unexpected for us on all sides. First, the mentors were our very best drivers, and they were evangelists for the brand. So, what they did was they would share personal tips on when and where to drive.
Oftentimes they shared their contact info. And this created tremendous leverage and social proof for those new drivers who were on the fence about taking strangers into their car. It’s actually quite funny because we had the brightest minds in the company writing the best marketing emails and copy, like, “Hey, hop on the car and drive this Saturday.” And you had all those drivers and all those mentors like, “No, no, don’t listen to those Lyft guys. Here’s what you should do. Go on Tuesday at 2:00 PM, text me, I’ll tell you where the good spot is, and this is how you’re going to get rides. This is how you’re going to get rich and make a lot of money.” And this recognition lever was just so much more powerful than anything we could be telling you. And so, very, very efficient activation lever for the new drivers. For us, also incredibly scalable.
We could fly a small team to rigorously vet and onboard maybe like 10, 20 top drivers, and then they’d fly to a different market, and we would let the rest of our drivers be onboarded by those mentors. And even for those mentors, for those top drivers, it was an incredible recognition lever. For them, if you were a 4.9 driver, you had enough rides, you had a chance to make it into being a mentor, and this provided additional earnings opportunity for you. If you did two mentor sessions in an hour, you could make 70 bucks an hour. You could take a break from driving if you’re tired, and just do some of those. It felt like getting promoted at a job. And so, it actually had a huge impact on the retention of our very best drivers, which was unexpected. So, a lot of really, really interesting benefits, and we actually lean into this and built a couple of really fascinating variations of this for a while, but this allowed us to match most of Uber’s footprint with a 10th or a 20th of the resources at incredible speed, I guess.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is an amazing story, and it’s such a great lever that I totally agree, I don’t hear people using and I wonder why. So, what I’m hearing is it was cheaper, the drivers were making money. I imagine the drivers trained by the mentors ended up being better drivers, that’s what we saw at Airbnb, hosts that came in through a referral ended up being better hosts, for whatever reason. And you’re saying basically, this is what allowed you to compete with Uber at a much smaller scale and much less money raised. Amazing.
Benjamin Lauzier: Exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: You said there’s a couple of variations. Is there anything interesting there to share, just things that you built as a follow-up based on the success?
Benjamin Lauzier: So, the next step in that journey was basically we were growing like crazy, but now we had cracks in like the activation phase, but now we had a whole bunch of people dropping off in the funnel before activation]. So, they didn’t enter their SSN, they didn’t enter the right info for us to run all those checks in the previous steps of the onboarding flow. So, we built a team of hundreds of account executives, and their job was just pick up the phone and call those drivers. And so, we had the same aha moment of like could we get some of our best drivers to do that for us, and empower them to be a part of this? And so, we did this and we launched another, like I said, role. We called them recruiters. And so, as a recruiter, as a driver, you could just, if this was quiet on the road, you could just hop on your phone and you would have a mini sales dashboard where you could claim leads.
And this was a driver who had dropped off in the funnel, and you had a telephone number, you could just call them and text them. And same thing, those guys were outperforming our very best of trained salespeople, because it’s not like, “Hey, it’s Ben from Lyft. Hop on the road, please.” It’s like, “Hey, my name is James and I’m a fellow driver as well. Lyft told me that you have a incomplete application. Do you have any questions? Do you want me to come to your house, we can do this together?” And we would pay them 20 bucks per person that they converted to activation. And so, something incredibly scalable for us, another way for us to reward and recognize our best drivers.
And it also provided a really interesting way for us to smooth out the supply and demand. The problem with a marketplace like Lyft is that you have this big spike. Everyone wants to drive on a Tuesday at 2:00 PM, but everyone wants rides on a Saturday at 2:00 AM. And so, how can you manufacture demand during those low utilization times? This was a great way to do that. Now you could wait on the road and still make money while just sitting in your car while waiting for the next ride. So, this was another iteration of this model that was really cool.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. That is so cool. I just know the feeling of being on a team, coming up with this idea and the thing working must feel so great. Just like, “Holy shit, look at this. Look at all these cool things that we can do with our supply.” Something I wasn’t going to get into, but it might be interesting just to hear if you have thoughts on this. So, I’ve been a huge fan of Lyft from the beginning, I used Lyft the very first weekend it came out in San Francisco when there was like five drivers. It was like a beta test, I was friends with someone that worked at Lyft early on, and it was just like, “Man, Lyft’s the best.” I was like all Lyft, Uber sucks, I hate that. I want to give it the fist bump or the mustache. So great. Today though, I was just looking at market caps.
So, Uber is worth 5 billion. I’m curious if you have thoughts on just, it feels like Uber has won at this point, and I don’t know where Lyft goes. I know your heart is with Lyft and you worked at Lyft for a long time, I know it doesn’t feel great to see how things have played out necessarily. I’m curious just to hear your take on just what do you think Uber did, if you look back, that allowed them to basically win? And where do you think Lyft goes from here? What do you think happens with Lyft? They’re still worth 5 billion, it’s still a huge, amazing, successful business, but just where do you think things go?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah. I think it all went south when I left the company. I’m just kidding. No, and again, I have to call out the fact that I haven’t been close to Lyft, and their business and strategy for many years at this point. So, take this with a grain of salt. This is my very naive perspective, but I think to me, perhaps the biggest blow to Lyft’s business was somewhat inherent, like the vision. Lyft’s vision was always anchored around transportation, people of transportation. The founders were deeply passionate about moving people, they were passionate about transforming the way people move around in a city. They wanted to just change how cities are designed, how roads are designed. And so, that meant investing in dynamic shuttles and things like that, and there’s a lot of experimentation that went to that. But it also meant that Lyft never invested in things like food delivery, or goods and parcels, and things like that.
And I think that crushed them during COVID essentially. I think Uber had, I think at some point their slogan was moving in bits and atoms, or something like that. But I think it implies this notion of being a logistics platform for assets in the world, for transporting people, for transporting things, for transporting … And I think they built, they invested lot in trucks and food delivery, and all those really exotic things that Lyft had never any intention to invest in. Not even because of the lack of resources, but because this was in part a distraction from our vision. We wanted to change how people move around in cities, we wanted to reinvent public transportation, we did not want to be a DoorDash competitor and help you get in donuts during COVID. And a huge part of it also was leaning heavily in shared rides. And so, this was like, again, how do you reinvent public transportation?
It’s like every car is a dynamic bus, and now there’s a bus line. The bus line is always running, it’s always by your house. So, a lot of our investment I think in thinking went in that direction, and the last thing that people wanted with COVID was to be in a car with five strangers, but what people wanted is food delivered to their house. And so, I know that the business had a huge blow during COVID, whereas I think Uber was able to rebound much more quickly because of how diversified the business was. And so, it’s funny now because I think Lyft actually killed shared rides, which was just so core to their identity. They were the first ones to launch this. And so yeah, the new COO I think killed the shared rides, which actually I’m really sad about. But yeah, so I think it indicates a very different vision now, a very different direction for the business. And yeah, that’s my take, I guess.
Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. So, essentially COVID really effed them because their strategy was always about transportation, and when nobody needs a ride and people want food, strategically Uber made a really good move expanding into food delivery, which I think was a bigger business than rides for a long time. I don’t know where it’s at today for Uber, and Lyft didn’t have that, and it’s hard to recover from a time like that. So, it sounds like it’s a combination of strategy was pointing Lyft in a certain direction, and circumstances in the world just made it really hard-
Benjamin Lauzier: And losing me me.
Lenny Rachitsky: And losing Ben. So, you left in 2019, March 2019, and is that when they went public?
Benjamin Lauzier: Not for the IPO.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, and it’s all downhill from then. And then-
Benjamin Lauzier: I’m telling you.
Lenny Rachitsky: … during COVID actually, when there was a big bump, which I think when people started riding again, and then it went down again. So, I think there was a correlation there, so there we go. That’s the thing, don’t ever fire Ben, don’t let Ben leave. That’s our take on it.
Benjamin Lauzier: I was not fired, yeah. Just to be clear.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, just different ways you might leave a company, don’t let it happen.
Benjamin Lauzier: I know, I’m kidding.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so there’s two more things I want to spend a little time on before we close up. One is your work in Europe, so you’re a product leader in Europe, and I want to hear a little bit about what it’s like to be a product person in Europe. And then two, I want to hear about the startup. So, at this point no one can actually fire. You have your own company that you’re running, and I want to spend a little time here. Usually we don’t spend time on this sort of stuff, but you’re working on something very cool that I think is going to be really helpful to a lot of people in a really meaningful way. So, I want to spend a little time there. But before that, so you’re living in France now. Before you started your company, you were interviewing for CPR roles in France, you work with a lot of French companies, European companies. I’m curious what you’ve noticed might be different in the cultures of tech companies in France and Europe in general versus the U.S.
Benjamin Lauzier: It’s been really fascinating, I think. So, my entire career has been in the U.S., and I’m just starting to understand what that European and the French market in particular looks like. And my read so far is that product management has really exploded I think in Europe in recent years, but the market dynamics are still quite different. In the U.S. I think you have this inherently very liquid and dynamic market. I think, this is my interpretation of it, but I think it leads to greater ownership and accountability for people and product at all levels. So, product managers and leaders, they join a startup and you’re immediately in charge of a relatively meaningful piece of the business, with genuine autonomy oftentimes. It doesn’t always happen, but oftentimes I think that’s the case. And if things don’t work out, well, there’s this expectation that you’ll be managed out.
There are countless memes on LinkedIn about the tenure of CPOs at tech companies to illustrate that. I think in France the market is much less liquid, so it’s incredibly difficult to change jobs, and it’s very expensive to fire someone in France. So, it seems to lead to two effects beyond the obvious job security. One is, I think PMs tend to have less autonomy and ownership, and a little bit more like micromanagement. And there are also less business owners than they can be in the U.S. And I see founders and managers struggling to let go of control a little bit more, again because it’s understandable in a way, you don’t have as much of a control as you do in the U.S. And so, you see a lot of really fascinating effects.
You have startups who tend to wait a little bit longer before hiring, especially in product. The art of product a little bit less of a thing. You have a lot of amazing PMs in France, but the recognition of the craft is a little bit different outside of the people who practice it. And you have a lot of real interesting outsourcing also, you see startups and companies of all sizes actually relying on great product studios, like Mozza, to build end-to-end products from the ground up. So, something that’s been really, really interesting. Another side that I see is this dominance of business over tech in France.
There isn’t as much of a cult of technology and software engineering in France as there is in the U.S. And so, the French Ivy League schools are business schools, like HEC, and the most highly valuable skill that you get is soft skills around management and business. It differs from the stereotype of the CS degree, Stanford dropout that you have in Silicon Valley. And I think because of a few of those things that I just mentioned, less liquid job market, but also less liquid financial markets, the last thing that I’ve observed that’s interesting that’s also around ownership I guess, is equity is much less meaningful in France. So, of the product leaders that I talked to, most of them consider their equity to be virtually worthless. None of them know of anyone who’s made a down payment on a house thanks to their sort of equity.
So, it’s seen as a nice bonus, but it’s not the token of ownership and the promise of future wealth that it can be in the U.S. when you join a startup. For exec roles, I think it’s often sub 10% of their total compensation, whereas in the U.S. it’s very often more than 50% of your compensation will be equity. So, that’s been interesting in terms of the dynamic, but it’s also been real interesting to just see how vibrant the startup culture is here in France. You have a truly exciting innovation happening, especially in AI. You have a lot of French companies at the forefront of this, like Mistral AI and Hugging Face, and things like that.
And also how it’s been exciting to see how the government is leaning into that as a catalyst for this innovation. I think the French government has dedicated something like $2.5 billion in funding to support French AI excellence by 2030. So, they’re running a lot of internal government incubators to try to disrupt some of the government functions from the inside, and they’re hiring top talents to do that. I’ve met some of the people working on this, it’s just really fascinating. It makes me super excited about what a federal startup task of reinventing [inaudible 01:04:38] would look like. So yeah, it’s been really exciting to see the whole space and how it differs from the U.S.
Lenny Rachitsky: Fascinating. So, I know there’s also AI regulation that feels really strange in Europe, but think that’s EU based, not like France specifically.
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that people are not excited about. There’s just a lot of fear of AI, and so there’s a lot of regulation talk in Europe.
Benjamin Lauzier: I’m a big Android guy, and a lot of the features like Gemini and all this is only available in the U.S., and now that I’m in France I see the difference a little bit.
Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. So, the cultural differences you spoke of, do you think they’re rooted in the fact that people don’t move jobs often, or is it culture? People just don’t learn to work in the way that people learn to work in the U.S. in the product role? What do you think is the root of why things are so different?
Benjamin Lauzier: I’m not quite sure, it’s a good question. My take, and I think this is I’m sure very naive and reductive, and I know this is one of my core principles, so I’m sure I also have a tunnel vision on this a little bit. But to me, one of the biggest difference that I see is really around this concept of ownership and accountability. Whereas in the U.S., and again, I saw it, I’m sure you saw it at Airbnb, you see it at a lot of companies, not everywhere, but a lot of companies will hire you, give you a big chunk of the business, and it’s up to you to prove yourself out. Where you have six months, you have a year, it’s up to you to show impact. I think the French employment model is less conducive to this type of dynamic, because employment is much more rigid.
So, you have much less of this hire now and prove yourself out, it’s much more of prove yourself beforehand. And if you’ve made a bad hire than as a founder, you become perhaps a little bit cagey about your vision. You want to be more hands-on because you made a bad hire. It’s not like someone perfect, then he’ll make you work but it means you’ll be more hands-on in the work of PMs daily, and perhaps we’ll think like, “Oh, maybe I don’t need product managers who want on my vision, I’ll hire project managers,” or something like that. So, it’s perhaps slightly more conducive to those types of dynamics.
Lenny Rachitsky: And you’re saying that’s in part because it’s harder to fire people in France and in Europe?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, I think so. It’s not just about firing I think, to be clear, I just think it’s culturally the market seems like a lot less liquid and dynamic.
Lenny Rachitsky: So, people don’t move around as much, they stick around for a long time.
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Got it. And it sounds like there’s also just a cultural difference of founders innately are much more, “I am in control, and I’m not going to hire people and trust you to take this thing on. I’m just going to run the show.” It’s basically Paul Graham’s founder mode is already instilled in everyone.
Benjamin Lauzier: Maybe yeah, maybe that’s a little bit. And I think also it’s this culture of business, so very business-centric sort of culture. And again, it makes sense, the markets, you have less venture capital, you have less equity in the financial markets as well. And so, when you raise funding you need to have a strong business case. The business case is at the center of your habits. Whereas I think oftentimes in the U.S. you have, again, it’s a little bit stereotypical, but it’s a very tech or product-centric view of the world, or it can be a very tech or product-centric view of the world where it’ll be like this product, this is the vision of the product, and sometimes even the business model will follow. And in France, I think the business model has to be front and center perhaps for you to be able to raise venture capital for you to be able to even exist. So, it means it attracts a lot of business minded entrepreneurs, much more so perhaps than tech-minded or product-minded entrepreneurs.
Lenny Rachitsky: Got it. If someone wants to help their company in Europe and France operate more closely to the way companies in the U.S. operate, do you have any advice for them? I know you talk and work with a lot of companies in Europe, what do you help them change and see differently?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, it’s a great question. I haven’t fully cracked that, and think it’s a really hard question. I’ll give some sort of small pointers that have helped at least some of the companies that I’ve talked to. But the one is equity, I think there’s a desire from a lot of the founders that I talk to, to give equity to employees, but because it’s not in the culture yet I think employees also have an under-appreciation for equity. Like, “Well yeah, it’s nice, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just work for the CEO anyways.” There’s less of this sense of, again, ownership that you can have in the U.S.
And so, I think leaning into that and investing in education around equity, the case is also in the U.S., I’m convinced 80% of people just don’t fully understand their equity. But I think leaning into that, especially in Europe, to help people understand the value of their equity, help them by telling more about the story of the business, the trajectory of the business, why it matters for their future equity. I think anything along those lines I think can help cultivate this greater ownership mindset, I think for people.
And then yeah, I think another big piece again is, at least to me this is a big recipe to successful product teams, is to develop teams that revolve around this concept of ownership and accountability teams that are clearly owning a huge, or it doesn’t have to be huge, like a slice of the business, not feature teams like shipping maybe guests, but teams that have clear accountability with consequences, but also clear ownership and leeway to do their best and to thrive.
Lenny Rachitsky: Again, I usually don’t spend time on this sort of thing, but I just think that what you’re working on is extremely cool, and I think it’s going to be really meaningful to a lot of people. And so, I just want to spend a few minutes giving you a chance to talk about what you’re working on now. You started a company, is this your first company that you’ve started?
Benjamin Lauzier: It is, yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: It is first company.
Benjamin Lauzier: First real company. Doesn’t accept projects, but first company.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, there’s a LC, there’s a C corp, or yeah, it’s like filed. There’s paperwork. Amazing. Talk about what you’re building, how people know how to find it if it’s right for them.
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, I have to say entrepreneurship has been a very humbling journey. I think the zero to one is way harder than anything us have done so far, and I feel like when you’re used to building and scaling products within companies, you take for granted, at least I did, I take for granted that the problem space has already been validated. You have some brand equity, even if you launch a new vertical, there’s an existing user base, there’s a validation of the broader problem space. I think going to truly zero felt, at least to me, super overwhelming and lonely, but also super exciting with tons of condensed learnings. It’s been a really interesting journey. So, what brought me there is my wife started to have some health issues about three years ago now, it’s partially why we decided to move to France last year just for a couple of years.
And she’s had this undiagnosed condition and chronic pain, and we saw just how much of a nightmare it was to manage her care and to navigate the healthcare system in the U.S. So, we’d wait three months for an appointment for a neurologist, then did see her for maybe eight minutes. Average appointment time in the U.S. is between 10 and 12 minutes. They’d dump a bunch of jargon, say like, “Hey, tests all look normal. Sorry, you should just go see this other specialist instead.” Would wait another three months, see another specialist. And with a lot of anxiety, a lot of pain, as you can imagine, all those things, you have another eight minute slot with someone and you’re like, “Oh, why didn’t the neurologist do this test? I can help you, let’s make some sense.” And so, it ends up being incredibly isolating. The whole time we just felt completely alone.
It was just like us and Google, we felt we kept getting conflicting advice from doctors, and I was spending all my time researching specialists, what solutions to consider, spend all my nights reading through research papers to [inaudible 01:12:48], “Hey, what is the academic consensus on this particular treatment that the doctors don’t seem to know about?” And throughout this whole process it felt like no one really had her back, no one within the medical system was fighting for her the way that your family doctor might have fought for you 20 years ago, knowing everything about you and being like, “Lenny, let’s talk about this. I know your uncle had this,” or there’s this sort of a sense of advocacy that came from your family doctor that just doesn’t exist today. It’s not uncommon for doctors to have thousands of patients that they see just a few minutes each year.
And so digging into this, we just realized it’s not an isolated case. You have nearly half of Americans have at least one chronic condition, or have to deal with some sort of complex health issue largely on their own. You see a lot of those large online communities revolving around chronic conditions or chronic pain, and trying to make sense of it and advocate for themselves. And I think I want to be clear, in my mind the problem is obviously not about the practitioners, it’s systemic. It’s just growing financial pressure from private equity firms, it’s just countless other factors. But you see the physicians being overwhelmed, overworked, burning out, and you see that pressure just only increasing, I think. So, I basically spent the next six months just talking to hundreds of patients, and doctors, and experts, and what we built is basically a platform to help people fight for their health.
And so, we want to close the gap between patients and the healthcare system. There’s this critical layer of the system that’s missing, I think, people are navigating life-threatening or debilitating conditions largely with Google, and at some point you just get tired of fighting for yourself. So, we connect people with complex conditions, typically with their own health advocate. So, it’s essentially like their own health assistant. They’re available 24/7 to help you navigate your care. So, we find appointments for you, we help you prepare your appointment, we make sense of a diagnosis, of test results. We spend hours researching solutions and potential treatments, and just more generally we do everything we can to help you just better advocate for themselves basically. And now we launched in the U.S. a early version of this few weeks ago, and the engagement has been really, really, really mind-blowing so far. And we’re helping cancer patients, people with a lot of those niche chronic conditions, and literally harassing the doctor’s office like, “Hey, we still haven’t received that referral.”
All the things that you just get tired of doing when you’re dealing with so many appointments, and when you’re having to manage a condition like this. And our mental model is what would we do if this user was our partner or our parent? You’d likely spend all night combing through research. You’d call all the providers in the state to be like, “Hey, who has an appointment?” Because there’s no PT available for the next two months. We’ll find you a PT available sooner. So, we’re building the engine to do that at scale essentially, and make people feel like they’re not alone and that someone is fighting for them.
Lenny Rachitsky: Super cool. It’s sad that we need something like this, but we do, because the healthcare system is so not ideal. And so, it’s basically someone in your corner that’s just, it’s like in the inside that knows how these things work that is there to help you through the process. What’s the company called, where do people find it?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, it’s called Nurra Health, and our website is Nurra, N-U-R-R-A.me.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome, and we’ll link to it in the show notes. And just to be clear, I’m not an investor, I’m just excited about this thing. I think a lot of people need this. Just to loop back to what we’ve been talking about, it’s not a marketplace. How would you describe this business in relation to marketplace companies?
Benjamin Lauzier: We’re ignoring the marketplace dynamics. I’m following my own advice, and I’m one jumpstarting one side of the marketplace, the health advocates were like jumpstarting this side for now, and we’re only focusing on what I think is going be the hardest side for us, and it’s going to be demand. How do we find those people? How do we create the right value proposition for them? So, that’s what we’re focused on.
Lenny Rachitsky: And so, in the future there may be a marketplace component, is what I’m hearing?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. Very cool. Ben, is there anything else that you want to share, mention, leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Benjamin Lauzier: No, no. Thank you.
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Ben, are you ready?
Benjamin Lauzier: I’m ready, let’s do it.
Lenny Rachitsky: All right. First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?
Benjamin Lauzier: I’ll give you books in different directions. One is Misbehaving: The Makings of Behavioral Economics. I’m really interested in behavioral economics, I love this intersection between economics and human psychology. It’s a great analogy for product, so that’s a great introduction to this field. The second book that I recommend a lot is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. I’ve always felt curious about a lot of things, but it’s made me feel like I’m decent at many things but I’m good at nothing. I’m very good at nothing. And so, even in my career I see all those pianists who are like machine learning gurus leading conferences on weekends that are contributing to think tanks, I just felt like a generalist.
So, if you feel this way, this is a good book to make you feel a little bit better by yourself and your imposter syndrome. At least it did for me. And last one, nothing to do with business, but Immune, by Philipp Dettmer. This is the creator of the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing this right, but it’s a science channel. If you’re even remotely curious about how your body works, how your immune system works, it’s an amazing book that’s really, really fun to read, super entertaining, and just great biology and fun book, I promise.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ve been trying to get the author of Range on the podcast, I have not had success yet. So, if anyone knows him, his name is Epstein? Is that right?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yes. David Epstein.
Lenny Rachitsky: David Epstein, please connect me. I would love to have him on the podcast. I really love his message of just, basically it’s the most successful people, or is it that you should be a generalist or that you can be very successful as a generalist? Is that the message?
Benjamin Lauzier: You can be very successful as a generalist. Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, great. I completely agree. That’s been me too. Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Benjamin Lauzier: TV show? I haven’t seen anything lately that’s been mind-blowing, but I’ll share an old new one. I’ve rewatched The Last of Us recently, and it’s an old favorite. I love the TV show. I like the game, I played the game many years ago, and love the TV show
Lenny Rachitsky: When the heck’s the next season coming up? I’m excited for that. Because I know the game has more-
Benjamin Lauzier: 2025.
Lenny Rachitsky: 2025. Oh man, so long. Okay, good to know though. Next question, do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?
Benjamin Lauzier: Maybe a little bit behind the curve on this one, but I’ve been loving the Arc browser. I don’t know if you use it, but it’s been-
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, I love Arc. It’s my number one, my main browser. Absolutely, I love it.
Benjamin Lauzier: Amazing. All right, so yeah, you know all about it. Yeah, it’s been really fun.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, just the onboarding of the Arc browser is such a lesson in onboarding. They do such an amazing job. It’s like that alone is a great thing to do as a product person, just see how they do onboarding.
Benjamin Lauzier: I was like, I’ve been using Chrome for 12 years, or I don’t know how many years, it feels like such high friction to change my entire life. In eight seconds it was done, it felt like home. I was like, “Wow, this is way faster than I expected.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Two more questions. Do you have a favorite motto that you often come back to or repeat yourself, share with friends or family?
Benjamin Lauzier: I don’t have anything particularly philosophical, unfortunately. I lived in [inaudible 01:20:16] for a few years. I live now in the French Alps, so I have a frame with a John Muir’s quote, “The mountains are calling and I must go.” I feel like this is, it’s my grounding place. The mountains are my happy place, and so I don’t share that work often. I don’t peace out in the middle of meetings like, “The mountains are calling, I must go.” But it’s been a grounding motto, I guess, for me.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s beautiful. My nervous system relaxes just hearing that quote, and I know you live in a mountainy part of France so you’ve done it, you’ve listened to the call. Final question. You live in France, the Olympics were just in Paris. Did you go to any of the games? Did you watch any of the games? Anything stand out to you about the Olympics that were not so far from where you are now?
Benjamin Lauzier: Good question. I did not see any live events, unfortunately. Perhaps the highlight for me was I’m a big mountain biker, but in the biking realm I love the Men BMX event where all three men on the podium were French, so this was a great moment for France.
Lenny Rachitsky: I didn’t even know that was an Olympic sport. So, it’s a BMX, like dirt bike kind of race.
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: So cool. Amazing. Ben, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions, where can folks find you online, and what else are you doing that people can check out if they want to learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Benjamin Lauzier: Yeah, you can find me, two things that are perhaps helpful for people out there. One is I have a Reforge course if you’re curious about marketplace, if you want to dig deeper into marketplace growth, I have a course on Reforge. We’re about to do our fifth or sixth cohort I think now. It’s been going really well, we’ve been working with tons of really, really cool marketplaces, going much deeper into some of the topics that we just talked about. So, if you’re interested in marketplaces, I would say check this out.
Lenny Rachitsky: And on that real quick, is the customer ideal, is it founders or is it like PMs at larger marketplace companies? Who is this perfect for?
Benjamin Lauzier: We’ve had both founders and PMs, and like a heads of product, but it’s my strong recommendation it’s people that have product market fit. Per our conversation, if you don’t have product market fit, wait a little bit before enrolling in this course. Focus on your core business before worrying about the marketplace dynamics aspect.
Lenny Rachitsky: And then I cut you off, there’s something else you were going to point people to?
Benjamin Lauzier: Oh, and just Nurra, the company that we’re building. Anyone that you know, or if you yourself have chronic or complex conditions, and if you feel like you need help managing your health and navigating your care, would love to help or share what you need, and how we can help you. And our website is Nurra.me, N-U-R-R-A.me.
Lenny Rachitsky: And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Benjamin Lauzier: If you have advice, if you know anyone in the space, if you’re interested in learning more about this, if you have advice, if you have learnings, if you know anything about this I would love to hear it. If you have hot takes about marketplace, if you disagree with any of what I’ve said, I’d love to also hear it.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love it. Ben, thank you so much for being here.
Benjamin Lauzier: Thank you so much for having me, it’s been a dream come true. Finally, I’m on this podcast.
Lenny Rachitsky: Same. Same for me, Ben. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Reformatted by reformat_english_direct.py
市场平台如何取胜:流动性、增长杠杆、质量等 | Benjamin Lauzier(Lyft、Thumbtack)
市场平台如何取胜:流动性、增长杠杆、质量等 | Benjamin Lauzier(Lyft、Thumbtack)
访谈记录
Benjamin Lauzier: 我认为运营市场平台的时候,人们往往会稍微待在自己的象牙塔里,盯着数据,想着”要是能让用户做某件事,对所有人都会更好”。我在职业生涯中当然也这样做过。但我认为这忽略了一个要点——我们是人,有时候我们的行为方式是非确定性的,或者说是反直觉的。不过我的观点是,我坚定地相信市场力量和赋权,所以要为你的市场平台中良好的体验设定护栏,确立明确的质量标准,为供给方提供正确的指导和工具帮助他们成功,然后退后一步,看看缺口在哪里,再投入更多实操性的策略去更精准地弥补这些缺口。
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天的嘉宾是 Ben Lauzier。Ben 曾是 Thumbtack 的产品与增长副总裁,在那里他重建了产品团队和 Thumbtack 的增长策略,重新架构了收入模型,并在三年内帮助 Thumbtack 实现了三倍增长。在加入 Thumbtack 之前,Ben 在 Lyft 工作超过六年,是第 30 号员工,负责司机端的产品和增长业务,鼎盛时期每个月有 1% 的美国劳动力在为 Lyft 开车。目前他花时间为市场平台团队和创始人提供咨询,在 Reforge 教授市场平台增长课程,最近还创办了一家名为 Nurra 的医疗健康公司,帮助用户对接护理顾问,协助你应对美国的医疗体系。在我们的对话中,我们深入探讨了构建和规模化市场平台业务的许多关键要素,包括在达到产品市场契合之前应该关注什么、如何判断应该优先市场平台的哪一方、产品市场契合是什么样的、如何追踪流动性、大多数市场平台失败的原因是什么以及如何避免这些问题。
还有大量非常巧妙的增长策略案例,尤其是供给侧的,以及一些非常有趣的故事,讲述 Lyft 如何以十分之一的资源在早期与 Uber 竞争。作为额外收获,Ben 还分享了欧洲产品市场与美国产品市场有何不同,以及他鼓励欧洲公司在哪些方面做出改变以更高效地运营、更具创新力。这一期节目适合所有正在构建或正在考虑构建市场平台业务的人。如果你喜欢这个播客,别忘了在你喜欢的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注,这是避免错过未来节目的最佳方式,也对播客帮助极大。那么,让我请出 Ben Lauzier。
Ben,非常感谢你来参加节目,欢迎来到播客。
Benjamin Lauzier: 非常感谢,很高兴来到这里,谢谢你的邀请。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是我的荣幸。好的,你是世界上最了解、最有经验的构建和规模化市场平台公司的产品领导者之一,所以我想把大部分时间用来从你的大脑中尽可能多地提取关于如何构建和规模化市场平台业务的智慧,这样那些正在艰难构建自己的市场平台公司、或者正在考虑做市场平台业务的创始人和团队就可以节省大量时间和精力。你觉得怎么样?
Benjamin Lauzier: 听起来太棒了。这个标准很高,但我会努力达到你的期望。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我有信心我们能达到这个标准。让我先交代一点背景,对于那些不太了解什么是市场平台业务的人,他们听到市场平台公司这个词,最简单的方式来理解什么使一家公司成为市场平台公司和市场平台业务是什么?
什么是市场平台
Benjamin Lauzier: 就像你提到的,我热爱市场平台。我想我从事市场平台的构建和规模化工作已经将近十五年了,我觉得它们为我们作为产品经理所面临的挑战增添了如此迷人的一层维度——这是你在做市场平台时才会揭示出来的隐藏维度。理论上,构成市场平台的要素非常简单:两个或多个彼此不同的一方,他们互相提供价值,然后有一个中间方试图在中间促进这种价值交换。这个解释相当简单。但实际操作中,边缘情况总是更加微妙。你会遇到各种有趣的维度,比如中间方的介入程度决定了市场平台的托管程度。像 Craigslist 这样的平台是非常放手的、非托管的,而像 Lyft 这样的平台则更偏向半托管型,平台在很大程度上塑造了交易和价值交换的过程。我是这样理解的,不过市场平台还有各种令人着迷的变体。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你提到了托管型市场平台,以及这如何成为市场平台开始更多思考的方向,我想回过头来聊这个,因为这是一个非常重要的点。但先进一步明确一下,市场平台的一个关键特征是公司不拥有供给。这在某种意义上定义了市场平台——否则它们就只是在卖东西。
Benjamin Lauzier: 完全同意。是的。而且我觉得,有些公司声称自己是托管型市场平台,取决于你怎么看——也许跟投资者交流时你会选择某个角度来阐述——但这恰恰是你进入灰色地带的地方。不过确实,市场平台本身就意味着这样一个概念:两个独立的、理论上自主的双方,你帮助将他们连接起来,为他们提供价值交换的平台。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。那我们回过头来聊这个话题,因为这确实是一个非常重要的点,而且几乎所有市场平台最终都会朝这个方向演进或思考这个问题——那就是”我们要控制供给,我们要管理它,未来甚至可能拥有它”。不过先回到这个问题。你接触过大量的市场平台,自己也构建过不少市场平台。你觉得打造一个成功的市场平台业务,最大的困难是什么?人们最常遇到的问题是什么?
Benjamin Lauzier: 我觉得挑战可以分为两类:一类是关于创建一个市场平台,另一类是关于规模化一个市场平台。对于创建市场平台,我见过很多处于产品市场契合之前阶段的创始人,他们特别渴望深入研究市场平台的动态机制。他们对推出一个市场平台充满热情——我们都一样——他们想讨论供给和需求,想研究各种比率,给我看经济学论文并问我”如何把这个原理应用到我的公司上?“在这种情况下,我的建议通常都是:“如果你还没有达到产品市场契合,如果你对市场平台的至少一方还没有一个足够好的增长策略,那就先把所有这些市场平台的东西忘掉。”
专注于核心的价值交换,深入服务市场平台的一方,然后看看能不能暂时用一些权宜之计、一些 hack 来应付另一边。你会看到像 Airbnb 和 Thumbtack 这样的公司在早期就是这样借助 Craigslist 来启动增长的,这样的例子不胜枚举。不要被市场平台这个光鲜亮丽、在智力上充满挑战性的想法所分散注意力,先把你产品市场契合的基本功打扎实。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想在这里多花一点时间,让这个建议更具体一些。你的意思是,在产品市场契合之前——也就是在你还没有发现有人真正想要你正在构建的东西之前——先专注于找到一种方法来增长市场平台的一方。所以我可能有两个快速跟进的问题:你怎么知道最初应该聚焦哪一方?还有你能不能举个例子——我觉得 Thumbtack 可能就是一个很好的例子——来说明他们是怎么做的?
先攻最难的那一方
Benjamin Lauzier: 关于应该聚焦哪一方,有不同的方法,但通常大家会选择最难的那一方。我拿 Thumbtack 来举例,因为我们正好要谈到它。Thumbtack 是一个家居服务市场平台,帮你找到水管工、电工等,而那边最难的一方是需求方。供给方是存在的,你可以翻开黄页,可以从某个地方找到水管工,但最难的问题是:我们能不能走出去找到那些想在房子里做点什么、有项目需要完成的人?我们获取这些人、找到他们的核心增长策略是什么?我们能创造什么样的留存?我们能不能为他们创造一个令人愉悦的体验,让他们愿意回到我们的平台,让我们来打理他们的家居需求?
我的建议是选择最难的那一方。至于具体怎么操作,方法有很多,但一个常见的建议是:找到一种方法来启动一方。找到一种方法来 hack 一方,这也被叫做”单机模式”(play one player mode)——尝试找到一种方式,去接入那些已经潜伏着你市场平台某一方的现有渠道。同样,你会看到无数企业是建立在 Craigslist 之上的,我觉得 Thumbtack 在某种程度上也是其中之一。他们的思路是:“我们可以在 Thumbtack 上找到所有这些优秀的专业人士。当我们有一个人想要一项服务时——‘哦,你想重新装修厨房?‘——我们可以在后台去 Craigslist 上发布一个任务,然后我们会把所有在 Craigslist 上浏览寻找工作的承包商引导到我们的平台上来。”
这是一个典型的例子——你要关注的是核心价值主张:我们能不能让人们回到平台?我们能不能创造这种令人愉悦的价值交换?人们是否信任我们?我们是否有合适的审核机制来确保你雇佣了合适的人?什么会让你愿意再来?一旦这些搞定了,你就可以专注于如何在供给侧构建飞轮,如何管理并确保每个市场上有足够的水管工之类的问题。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你说的”找到最难的那一方”,怎么找到它呢?你对创始人和团队有什么建议吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 总的来说,直觉上团队自己是知道的,尤其是那些深入一线的团队,他们知道。“嗯,是的,我们能搞定 X。但我们真正头疼的是让学生来看这个东西。“这就是你的信号。我觉得有时候确实需要别人来点醒你,让你反思一下:“其实是的,你说得对。这一方是显而易见的,我们知道怎么获取它,我们只是没有合适的供给来匹配,也不知道去哪里找供给。“砰,这就是你应该集中精力攻克的那一方。然后你就去找办法——无论是获取需求方、补贴它,还是找其他什么方式——把精力集中在这个你完全不知道该怎么增长的一方上。你应该为这一方找到一个可靠的策略。
Lenny Rachitsky: 根据我的经验,几乎总是供给方是你需要重点攻克的那一方,因为一旦你有了优质的供给,人们就会非常乐意来使用它。比如 Uber 的司机、Airbnb 的房源、Thumbtack 上的专业人员。你的经验也是如此吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 是的。我觉得供给方大概在 80% 到 90% 的情况下是最难的那一方。是的,我完全同意。我试着想了想反例,但一时想不出来。我只是知道确实存在一些反例。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我知道一个,就是 Rover。根据我做的研究,因为事实证明,找到那些愿意每小时 50 美金遛狗、看狗的人非常容易。这个价值主张非常简单,所以他们有一个等待名单,报名的人太多了。还有一个是 TaskRabbit——他们有太多人想做 tasker,不管他们怎么称呼那个角色——
Benjamin Lauzier: 我也正想说 TaskRabbit。我也听说过那个,是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。然后你谈到了一个核心部分,就是要弄清楚如何增长那一方——如何增长最难的那一部分,通常是供给方。你已经分享了几个例子。你还记得有没有其他什么巧妙的做法可以分享的?就是人们在早期增长供给方的方法,也许能给现在正在试图解决这个问题的人一些启发?
Benjamin Lauzier: 是的,我觉得有几招非常常见的早期策略,是很多公司都会依赖的。我们刚才谈到过用某种方式来冷启动市场平台的一方——比如 Thumbtack 和 Lyft 的例子——还有就是利用招聘信息板。还有很多公司很早就会构建增值服务,作为早期留住供给方的核心手段。比如,让我们为这些供给方打造一个非常有吸引力的服务包,这会成为吸引所有人的关键。OpenTable 在这方面做得很好,提供了各种餐厅服务。另外我见过其他人在早期用得很好的方法,就是把你的供给方转化为需求方,或者把需求方转化为供给方。Lyft 就尝试过这个。实际上在 Lyft 效果并不好,但我知道其他市场平台用这个方法相当成功。
Lenny Rachitsky: 为了确保大家理解这一点——这个确实很有意思——以 Lyft 为例,就是说服司机成为乘客,说服乘客成为司机,而主要方向是后者,说服乘客去当司机。
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,没错。在我们 Lyft 早期的情形是,需求方有一个等待名单,因为我们就是没法足够快地上线供给方。于是我们有了一个弹窗的想法。与其显示”没有可用司机”,不如显示”嘿,抱歉,所有司机都在忙。现在大家每小时能赚 50 美金,你要不要开上你的车来接单?“确实有一些转化,但这感觉对整体体验有点干扰,而且也不是供给方增长的主要驱动力。但我知道 Uber 确实做到了。我认为他们有相当可观的一部分供给来自于这个方式。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,Uber 找到了更好的方法并且做成了,你什么感受?这感觉不太——
Benjamin Lauzier: 而且是不同的用户群体。你会觉得 Lyft 的乘客和司机之间更容易在两个角色之间来回切换。我也不知道,不好说。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是啊,Uber 的一个产品经理居然超过了你们。哦,不妙。
Benjamin Lauzier: 是的,在另外几件事上也是。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思。
Benjamin Lauzier: 不过我们在其他几件事上也超过了他们。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的好的。那倒是。所以我们刚才花了一些时间讨论的,本质上就是:当你启动一个市场平台的时候,要搞清楚你需要驱动哪一方,因为那才是解锁这个机会的关键。有一件从来没人做过的难事,大多数情况下就是建立一批前所未有的供给,而有各种策略可以做到这一点。回到我最初问的主要问题——我们已经跑题跑了很精彩的一段——就是在产品市场契合之前,在你甚至还不确定这件事能不能成立之前,你大部分时间应该花在建设供给方上,来看看需求方、客户是否真的想要这个东西。对吧?
流动性:市场平台制胜的关键
Benjamin Lauzier: 完全正确。然后我觉得还有一组不同的挑战。我看到的另一个常见陷阱是:在产品市场契合之前,人们容易被我们刚才讨论的那些市场平台动态所分心,而不是去做我们刚才说的那些事。而对于那些已经有了一定规模、实现了产品市场契合的公司,我观察到人们最容易栽跟头的地方,是流动性这个概念,或者说如何衡量市场平台的健康度。在我看来,流动性是市场平台制胜的关键。它衡量的是你高效匹配买家和卖家的能力,是人们在你的平台上多快、多高效地找到他们想要的东西。你可以想象一个韦恩图:一个圆圈是供给方想卖的东西,另一个圆圈是需求方想买的东西,而你的流动性就是这两个圆圈的重叠部分。
以 Lyft 或 Uber 为例,因为我们刚才提到了它们——流动性就是所有打开 app 打算叫车的人当中,有多少最终完成了叫车。这个流动性指标,是你市场平台效率的直接乘数。它实际上处于你愿景的核心位置,你作为市场平台存在的理由就是把这两方连接起来。它也是最核心的参与循环。供给越多,选择越多,服务越好,越可能转化为交易,也越可能让用户回来。所以它真的是一个很奇妙的循环。而我观察到的是,很多人没有意识到这个环节在市场平台中有多关键,难以给自己的业务定义流动性,更重要的是,难以围绕它制定一套可执行的运营手册。就是,“好的,我怎么管理这个东西?它很重要,但我该怎么做?”
Lenny Rachitsky: 你有没有推荐的、让人们具体去看的指标来理解流动性?
市场健康指标:流动性的最佳预测指标
Benjamin Lauzier: 我最喜欢的指标是流动性的预测指标。你的流动性——它通常是需求利用率的衡量。可能是有意图的搜索中,有多少最终转化为交易。所以本质上就是你有意图的需求的成交率,这能很好地反映你市场平台的净产出。它能让你了解市场平台的健康状态,但它会受到很多不同因素的影响。想想 Thumbtack 的例子,它可能受到暴风雪的影响,受到竞争对手竞价的影响,有各种各样的外部因素在起作用。而我认为稍微更具可操作性、虽然更难定义但在我的观点中却有用得多的指标,是这样的。
我把它叫做市场健康指标,基本上可以理解为——找到你流动性的最佳预测代理指标。我用 Lyft 的例子来说明。你的流动性是你的需求利用率,即多少次 app 打开转化成了实际叫车。那什么能预测这个?什么能预测你是否决定叫一辆车?对于 Lyft 和 Uber 来说,就是预计到达时间(ETA)。我们发现,如果离你最近的司机在两分钟或更短的距离内,我们就触及了一个天花板——你的转化概率超过某个阈值,非常可能下单叫车。如果超过两分钟,比如五分钟,那你可能去看看 Uber,可能走路,可能坐公交。如果是两分钟以内,差别就不够大,你直接就叫车了。
所以要找到这个阈值,找到这个趋于平台期、与留存率和交易达成都强相关的预测指标。这就是你可以用来预测的指标,也是对团队来说可操作性高得多的指标。如果你是供给团队,你就可以想,“好的,我往平台上加了 100 个供给,我想知道这是否真的在缩短 ETA”,或者你可以看类似这样的相关性,并且排除掉我之前提到的那些外部因素的干扰。
流动性与供给的关系
Lenny Rachitsky: 很好。所以本质上,很多人喜欢用的术语是”需求成交率”(fill rate),也就是有意图的用户的转化率。以 Airbnb 为例,我们当时的做法完全一样——我们把搜索时带日期的用户视为有意图的用户,然后看他们中有多少最终完成了预订。所以这基本上就是你要追踪的指标,而你的观点是,这是一个产出指标。这是你想要提升的目标,但为了提升它,有一个最大的杠杆在驱动需求成交率。根据你的经验,也是我完全观察到的一样,通常就是供给量。你有没有足够多的优质供给?所以在 Lyft 的例子中就是,你有没有足够多的车?在 Airbnb 就是有没有足够多的房源,在 Thumbtack 就是有没有足够多的水管工?这通常就是你能真正影响需求成交率的地方。
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,完全正确。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这就成了团队的目标,成了公司的焦点——基本上就是把你所在的所有小市场、所有品类里的这个指标往上推。
Benjamin Lauzier: 完全正确,没错。
判断产品市场契合
Lenny Rachitsky: 你提到了产品市场契合的概念,以及在达到产品市场契合之前和之后情况会发生变化。一个经典问题——我很好奇你在这方面有没有什么洞察:你怎么判断自己已经爬上了产品市场契合那座山丘?你可能在某个市场平台中拥有了产品市场契合,或者确定已经拥有了?
Benjamin Lauzier: 这很难,因为在我看来,这两者基本是相互独立的。也许这是一个有争议的观点,但我觉得产品市场契合与你市场平台的动态是相互独立的。你可能有一个很棒的产品,对双边都提供了惊人的价值,但你还没有在供给方破解增长飞轮——不知道如何把这些用户拉进来。比如,你还没有找到正确的产品渠道契合。这会对你的市场平台动态产生巨大影响。所以,对我来说,我的回答会比较传统——就像对待普通公司一样去衡量你的产品市场契合。是的,这更多是一门艺术而非科学,但我喜欢那个经典的方法:如果我们把这个产品拿走,有多少比例的用户会非常失望,或者根本没有其他替代方案?
这类问题直击你的解决方案对用户到底有多大价值的本质,你可以在供给方和需求方分别做这个测试。我在这里的建议通常是,你要意识到自己本质上需要两个产品市场契合。你要确保在市场平台的双边都有足够有吸引力的价值主张。很多时候,在初期你在需求方找到了产品市场契合,但你发现这对你的供给方来说吸引力不够,因为你的利润率太高或类似的原因。所以要认识到你需要同时满足这两件事,但我觉得你可以用相对传统的方式来衡量它们,而且这与市场平台动态是独立的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这个观点。我们刚刚请了 Sean Ellis 来播客,专门聊了那个调查方法——Sean Ellis 测试,就是问用户如果产品不存在了他们会多失望。我特别喜欢你反复回到这个观点——我百分之百同意——市场平台业务面临的大部分挑战,90% 和非市场平台业务是一样的。人们过度关注”哦,我需要以市场平台的思维来思考,需要研究所有这些市场平台的理论”。但实际上,每个创始人面对的都是同样的问题——产品市场契合,只不过你有两边要处理;增长策略,只不过你有两边要做。所以我喜欢你不断回到这一点。
什么时候市场平台是好的商业模式
有个我特别想聊的话题:当人们考虑创办一家市场平台公司时,什么信号说明市场平台模式适合这个想法?因为我觉得很多人一上来就想,“我要建一个市场平台,我要把两边连接起来,肯定很棒”,但这个业务、这个垂直领域里根本不需要市场平台。有什么信号可以判断市场平台动态和商业模式适合某个想法,还是说不适合?
Benjamin Lauzier: 从来没有人会说”我要做一个 X 领域的 Airbnb”——好吧,其实人们确实会说这种话。我认为能想到的信号,第一是较高的碎片化程度。你需要买家和卖家的长尾分布,而不是少数几个大玩家控制市场,因为只有在这样的场景下你才能通过聚合来创造价值。第二是需求要相对统一。也就是说你的供给在某种程度上可以标准化。这也正是服务类市场平台——比如 Thumbtack——之所以棘手的原因。因为在 eBay 上,卖家想卖的是非常清晰明确的库存商品;而在 Thumbtack 上,电工只想要特定类型的活儿,而且只有那天有空才接。他们可能接了一个活儿又取消了,因为来了个更好的。
这使得供给的定义变得非常模糊,而且需求也差异很大。一个电工想要的和另一个电工对同一个需求单元的理解可能完全不同,这就变得非常非常困难。所以不是不可行,但我会说这不是做市场平台的有利条件。所以,需求相对统一。最后一点我想提的是,匹配或撮合的门槛要足够高。今天人们找到彼此有多难?他们需要花多少精力去筛选对方?我认为这是另一个很好的信号。门槛越高,机会越大,因为这意味着你进场后可以通过实施正确的流程来简化这个价值交换。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了。我很想知道你有没有什么例子,人们尝试过的糟糕的市场平台想法。不过让我先总结一下你刚才说的三个要点,我很喜欢。这些是市场平台生意的好机会的信号:第一,双边都高度碎片化。某一侧不会只有少数几家公司或客户,因为如果有的话,他们为什么需要你?就五家航空公司什么的,你不需要一个市场平台来匹配航空公司。第二,需求统一,需求基本一致。我就是想住房子,我想要一辆车带我去某个地方,我想要一个水管工。
第三是存在门槛,匹配和帮助用户完成预订、与服务者合作的过程有复杂性。找车的话,比如——我不会随便在街上拦一辆车,这有难度。我不会随便跑去问一个人”能住你家吗?“这些都是有门槛的。
Benjamin Lauzier: 完全正确。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你有没有见过什么公司的例子,就是那种”这永远不会作为市场平台成功”的,或者有没有什么有趣的例子是某个东西试图做市场平台但其实不适合的……
过度赋予用户控制的代价
Benjamin Lauzier: 我没有一个很好的例子来回答这个问题,但我可以举一个有点相关的例子。我不想指名道姓,我很尊重那家公司和他们的努力,但当时的 Sidecar 是另一家与 Lyft 和 Uber 竞争的网约车公司,我相信那里面有很多值得总结的教训。他们最终关闭了业务,但我认为他们很早采取的一个差异化方向,在我眼里也许非常天真,是一个错误——他们决定把完全的控制权交给用户。作为用户,你有一大堆筛选项,你可以决定”我要一辆至少2015年或更新的车”,“我要一个至少达到某个标准的司机”。所以我认为这个理论在纸面上是说得通的,就是”嘿,我们给人们更多控制权”。
但你面对的是 Lyft 和 Uber 这些竞争者,人们在那种标准化体验中感到被束缚,“我们要通过给你选择权来竞争,你来决定你想要的体验。“但我认为在现实中,这只是进一步分裂了你的市场平台,你的市场平台会出现超级碎片化,而且我认为这对他们的服务等级协议(SLA)造成了相当严重的损害。想想预计到达时间(ETA),当你明确要求”对,我要一辆更新的车”,然后你把滑块拉到2020年,却没意识到你刚刚损失了10分钟,因为本来有一个很棒的司机,但他开的是2018年的本田思域,不符合你的特殊要求。
所以,我觉得做市场平台的人往往倾向于给用户很多控制权,因为这是用户想要的,或者这在用户反馈中经常出现,比如”哦,我们有两类不同的用户。一类真的很想要新车。另一类不想要。“于是自然而然地,产品团队就做了一个新车的开关。我认为错误在于,你在不知不觉中以比你预想的更大的方式碎片化了你的供给侧,对你市场平台的健康产生了深远影响。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我认为这是另一个极好的例子,说明不要过度听从用户,而要做你认为对业务最好的事情,这甚至不仅仅是市场平台的教训。总体来说,你都不应该给用户超出他们成功和快乐所需的选择。我觉得 Sidecar 之所以这样做,是因为他们试图与 Lyft 和 Uber 差异化,“我们能做什么不一样的?“然后他们想”哦,给人们所有这些选项。“我印象中他们甚至让司机自己设定乘车价格,这就让事情变得更加复杂了。大家看着”天哪,这么多车,这么多不同的价格”,但我尊重他们的尝试,因为他们毕竟只是第三者,不是双关语。
Benjamin Lauzier: 讽刺的是,这几乎与我通常给那些在市场平台健康方面苦苦挣扎的公司的建议完全相反。我的建议是,如果你有不同的垂直领域,尽可能打开你的供给围墙。你的用户告诉你想要 X,但试着给他们一些与你认为他们想要的有所关联的东西,因为他们大概率其实也能接受。Thumbtack 有一个非常精彩的例子,就是烟雾机的故事。Thumbtack 现在更专注于家庭服务,但几年前他们也做很多活动业务。所以你有 DJ、摄影师,很多人在平台上雇佣婚礼 DJ。其中一个复选框是烟雾机,结果很多人勾选了这个选项。你就会想,“对,太棒了,我要在我的婚礼上有一台烟雾机。”
但他们不知道的是,我们的 DJ 中只有5%有烟雾机,所以你实际上排除了95%的供给。当我们跟用户沟通时,他们说”哦,不不,我没那么在乎烟雾机。我没意识到勾选这个会自动去掉一半的供给。“所以,想办法让这个复选框影响排序而不是实际过滤,这是一个很好的例子,说明你可以在倾听用户的同时调整体验,但简化他们的认知负担——“嘿,我们知道你更想要烟雾机,但我们足够聪明,知道它大概率不是你的决定性因素。“
市场平台失败的常见原因
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这个例子。我觉得还有一件重要的事情需要简要谈谈,就是当你考虑搭建一个市场平台时,很多时候它们失败是因为商业模式根本行不通。我想到像 Cherry 这样的公司,试图做”洗车界的 Uber”。理论上这个想法很聪明——按需洗车。问题是没有人愿意为洗车人员上门洗车付那个成本。清洁服务可能是另一个例子,还有类似……
Benjamin Lauzier: Exec 也是我想到的另一个例子。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,Exec,就是那种”来个人帮我做事”的模式。
Benjamin Lauzier: 差不多。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以,关于这一点你有什么想补充的吗?就是”这是你的市场平台可能失败的另一个原因”?也许让我扩展一下这个问题。根据你的经验,市场平台失败最常见的原因是什么?我觉得有必要说的是,大多数市场平台的想法都会失败,就像大多数创业想法都会失败一样。
Benjamin Lauzier: 是的,大多数想法总体来说都会失败,我同意。
Lenny Rachitsky: 大多数想法都会失败,没错。回到正题,你面临的大多数挑战与所有公司在市场平台之外面临的挑战是一样的。所以让我问一下,也许是专门针对市场平台领域,或者更广泛地,市场平台失败的最大原因是什么?
Benjamin Lauzier: 我想到几个方面。一个是我们谈到过的流动性这个概念。你需要启动这个增长飞轮,需要在市场平台中建立足够的密度。根据业务的不同,这可能需要大量的时间或金钱,如果没有正确的诊断框架,你可能在两者都耗尽之前就出局了。这是我反复看到的问题,我在 Lyft 亲身感受过,在其他公司也见过——那种紧迫感,“我们必须到达那个临界点,否则在双方都有足够好的体验之前就是一场注定失败的战斗。”
我看到的另一个问题是忽视某一侧。我们之前谈到过在早期可以这样做,但我看到很多规模较大的公司太长时间只做单边业务。很多大型市场平台只关注他们的需求方漏斗。
他们投放广告,获取点击,把点击转化为收入,然后试图获得足够的供给,让用户体验直觉上足够好。我的建议是,如果你这样做的话,你正在错失你业务的一半。关键在于市场平台的反应是非常滞后的,所以一旦你的网络效应开始衰退,就会陷入一种恐慌时刻,“糟糕,我们忘了我们一半的用户。我们忘了卖家也是人,他们都在离开,现在我们需要彻底改造我们的产品来挽救局面,为他们创造有吸引力的价值主张。“所以,我看到的另一个问题是,企业太晚才意识到他们是市场平台,有着真正的市场平台需求。
最后一个是质量。我们之前谈到过一点质量问题,但这并不意味着你的市场平台中总是需要拥有最好的质量,但作为一个市场平台本身就意味着一定程度的筛选和把控。
质量管控的刻意性
Benjamin Lauzier:
你需要有意识地明确你想要提供的质量水平。我认为很多公司并不一定有这种意识,你会不断面临供给的压力——“只要我们稍微降低标准,就能获得更多供给。“结果就是,我们多少都经历过这种情况——你找到某个电商网站,搜索某样东西,心里想”天哪,这看起来太不靠谱了”,因为所有卖家看起来都不怎么样。这就是质量问题。所以,你需要对质量保持刻意为之的态度,我认为这是企业容易失败的另一个领域。
托管型市场平台的困境
Lenny Rachitsky:
从质量这个话题自然过渡,我想谈谈托管型市场平台和托管供给的问题。我认为质量之所以对市场平台来说是个如此大的问题,是因为你不拥有也不控制你市场平台上的供给——你不仅仅是在卖东西,质量天生就是一个挑战。Airbnb 不拥有房屋,Uber 不雇佣司机。他们甚至不能在法律上明确告诉司机该做什么,因为司机是合同工,所以质量永远是市场平台面临的一个持续性挑战。因此,总是存在一种向托管型市场平台方向推进的推力。我们给人们更多的指导,也许他们拥有部分供给,也许在培训上大量投入,诸如此类。在理想世界中——不是说一个虚构的世界——如果你拥有供给,质量当然最好。但那样你就不再是市场平台了,你的商业模式就很糟糕了。对于那些正在考虑变得更”托管”的市场平台,你有什么想法吗?什么时候向这个方向靠拢是合理的?应该走多远?
Benjamin Lauzier:
我认为当你运营一个市场平台时,你往往会坐在象牙塔里,看看数据,想着”要是能让人们去做 X,对所有人都会更好。“我职业生涯中当然也这样做过。但我觉得这忽略了一点——我们是人,有时候我们的行为方式是非确定性的、直觉驱动的。我再举一个例子。我们最初向专业人士——比如水管工和电工——销售线索。这些线索中,显然只有一部分会转化为实际的工作和收入。而我们也看到那些专业人士总是很擅长把线索转化为实际工作。所以,很自然地,我们认为可以通过提高他们的 ROI,直接向这些专业人士销售预约订单,从而为消费者和专业人士提供更一致的体验。从某种形式的线索销售转向直接预约——这是市场平台中常见的做法。
从数据上看,一切都很完美。我们知道大概能将他们的 ROI 提高 20% 左右。于是我们上线了这个功能,结果专业人士们讨厌它。他们讨厌它,是因为他们在潜意识里其实享受销售的刺激感。他们喜欢与消费者接触的过程,而且有时会完全高估自己成交客户的能力。他们会说:“你把那些电话都拿走了,我本来忙得不亦乐乎,觉得自己在拼命,马上就要成交这个客户了。“所以,不管数据怎么显示”哦,我们提高了他们 20% 的收入”,专业人士并不这么认为,而且他们有权感受他们想感受的。我们在 Lyft 也看到了同样的现象——试图让司机收入波动更小时,我们必须对抗大量这种认知偏差和峰终效应(peak-end effect)。所以我想强调的是,任何试图加强控制的举措都可能非常棘手,并以不可预测的方式适得其反。
你还提到了雇佣分类的问题。在美国,当你谈到控制供给时,所有律师都会说”不不不,这可不是我们能做的”。因为如果你控制了供给,他们在法律上就可能被归类为雇员,从而有权获得一整套福利。所以总的来说,我的看法是——当然这取决于公司的类型——我非常相信市场力量和赋能。所以,为你的市场平台上良好的体验提供护栏,设定明确的质量标准,并提供正确的辅导和工具让供给方获得成功。然后退后一步,看看差距在哪里,再更有针对性地投资于更亲力亲为的策略来弥补这些差距。
比如大量的辅导工具——Lyft 做了,Uber 也做了——大多数市场平台都提供某种形式的辅导。你可能有一套评价体系,有卖家的星级评分,对于低于门槛的卖家,提供辅导,提供正确的工具和指导,让他们了解你市场平台上的标准,帮助他们达到那个门槛。对于那些仍然无法达标的人,那就是你需要投资更深度介入的工具的时候。这也是我们在 Lyft 做过的事情之一,和我们搞起来的那家租赁公司有关。我很乐意跟你多聊聊这个,挺有意思的。
不做托管也能提升质量的案例
Lenny Rachitsky:
我很想听听。在讲那个故事之前,你有没有想到哪个市场平台在不转向托管模式的情况下,非常擅长提升质量的?
Benjamin Lauzier:
有的,有一个叫 Toptal 的人才市场平台,他们就专门做这件事。他们的质量门槛非常高,声称平台上只有顶尖人才,我相信是前 3%。他们有一套非常出色的审核机制和流程。有个关于他们的趣闻:他们对外宣传的人才通过率大约是 3%,也就是说只录用 3% 的申请者。据说他们的实际通过率甚至比这还低,但他们觉得如果公开真实数字,听起来会太假。所以他们实际上宣称 3%,因为 1% 听起来太离谱了,反而会损害他们人才的信誉。所以他们是一家在早期通过大量不同审核环节来甄选质量方面做了巨大工作的公司,同时也在持续维护质量——通过合适的辅导工具、教育培训等手段。
Lenny Rachitsky:
这是一个非常好的例子。基本上他们就是严格筛选,只批准高质量的供给——在他们的案例中主要是工程师,对吧?Toptal 上应该主要是工程师?
Benjamin Lauzier:
没错,是的,主要是工程师、设计师之类的。
Lenny Rachitsky:
这只有在你的供给方中有大量人才想加入你的平台时才能做到,但这确实是一个很酷的例子。基本上就是只允许真正高质量的供给。让我们来听听那个租车的故事吧,这是 Lyft 尝试做租车业务,对吧?
Benjamin Lauzier:
对,没错。是这样的,稍微交代一下背景。当时我在 Lyft 负责司机端的产品,通用汽车在我们上一轮融资中投资了五亿美元。那是平安夜,我一直记得,我接到了 Lyft CEO 和通用汽车 CTO 的电话,我们决定基本上自建一家租车公司。背后的原因其实非常有趣。通用汽车有大量即将到期的租赁车辆,他们不得不拿到拍卖会上去卖,但又不知道该怎么处理这些车。而从我们的角度来看,我们正面临着巨大的供给缺口。我们之前讨论过这个问题,当时供给严重不足,增长速度极快,招募司机的速度根本跟不上,司机上线的速度也跟不上。当我们审视市场时,我们发现美国有 50% 的求职者和福利受助者没有车。
这就是我们的供给缺口。这是一个庞大的人群,我们之所以无法触达他们,就是因为他们没有车。所以,通过出租汽车,我们实质上可以自己制造供给。我们可以灵活地调节规模,可以非常精准地控制引入多少车辆、在哪些市场投放、以什么价格投放。我们甚至可以提出,如果每周驾驶 30 小时就可以免费使用车辆,从而彻底改变这些人的生活,让他们真正拥有出行能力。他们可以去买日用品,可以带孩子出去度假。这对各方来说都是巨大的双赢。我想在短短几个月内,我们从零开始建起了一家租车公司,18 个月内我们就成了全美第四大租车车队。
但这一切都源于我们看到的那个缺口——关键不在于控制司机本身,而在于我们想要精准施策。我们想要控制平台上车辆的质量。所以我们刚才谈到的那一点,就是一个很好的例子。在我们认为车辆质量偏低的市场,我们知道可以上线更多车况较新的租赁车辆,从而拉高平台车辆的平均车龄水平。所以我认为,这让我们以一种更加精准的方式获得了更多控制权。
Lenny Rachitsky:
所以并不是说你们在推出一项租车服务,核心思路是增加供给、给司机提供车辆,让他们能够成为司机。
Benjamin Lauzier:
两者兼有。我们确实上线了这个服务,司机可以从 Lyft 租车,在平台上接单,同时也可以用于个人日常出行。不过是的,核心确实如此。
Lenny Rachitsky:
明白了。那这实际上效果如何?确实产生了影响吗?这是个好主意吗?
Benjamin Lauzier:
是的,影响非常大。就像我提到的,我想我们把这项业务指数级地扩展到了——如果我没记错的话——全美第四大租车车队的规模。这对我们来说非常有效,一方面是因为我们拥有恰到好处的控制力,另一方面这些司机对我们极其忠诚。我们还有许多其他激励手段,比如可以提供免费用车,但前提是不能去竞争对手 Uber 那边接单,而且每周至少要驾驶 30 小时。所以这又为我们带来了更高的留存率、更高的参与度,对我们和司机来说都是一个真正的激励机制。
导师与大使计划
Lenny Rachitsky:
太棒了。而这个案例之所以最有趣的原因,可能在于它沿着市场平台的光谱走向了托管型市场平台的方向。它使你们更接近于自己承担费用、覆盖车辆成本的模式,而不再只是那种简单的、高效率的市场平台。
Benjamin Lauzier:
没错,是的。这就像是市场平台版本的——传统上黑色轿车车队老板有自己的车队和司机,而我们做的就是市场平台版本的那套模式。
Lenny Rachitsky:
而且这也是一个差异化优势,因为通用汽车和你们关系密切,所以你们拥有一个 Uber 所没有的杠杆。非常精彩。另一个我知道你投入了很多精力、我觉得非常有趣的话题,而且我认为对听众会很有帮助的,就是 Lyft 的导师计划和大使计划,以及它如何帮助你们比其他竞争对手更快地扩展规模。你能分享一下这个故事吗?
Benjamin Lauzier:
在 Lyft 很早期的时候,大概是 2014、2015 年,Uber 基本上是我们的 30 倍规模。他们的收入是我们的 30 倍,人员是我们的 30 倍,流动性也是我们的 30 倍,你能想到的任何维度都是如此。他们在疯狂增长,而我们多少有一种生死存亡的紧迫感,你可以想象,我们在想到底该怎么和他们竞争。我们必须非常聪明,公司里每个人做的事情都必须比竞争对手的效率高出十倍,仅仅是为了活下去。这就是底线——仅仅是不死而已,这给我们施加了巨大的压力。但我们基本上找到了一种巧妙的方式,以极低的成本和资源来完成司机的上线。让我先介绍一下当时上线流程是怎么运作的。在那个时候,成为司机的最后一步是通过背景调查和驾驶记录核查之后,你需要进行车辆目视检查、简短试驾、一些基础培训,我们会检查你的各类文件。
我们会核验你就是本人,检查驾照之类的东西。而 Uber 当时的做法是在当地组建团队,去开设办公室,搞类似车管所那样的集体上线培训和车辆检查。我们在最初的三到四个市场也是这么做的,但你可以想象其中的运营开销和前置时间。你得去找办公场地、签租约、招员工,前置周期非常非常长。我们思考了这个问题,而当时我们一个巨大的竞争优势是我们的品牌。作为乘客或司机,你为什么要使用一个流动性更低的平台?作为司机,你的收入保障更低。作为乘客,你的等待时间更长。你为什么会用这样的服务?因为品牌,因为它的价值观,因为它带给你的感受。
所以我们当时有粉色胡须标志,有非常强烈的品牌认同感。我觉得现在很多东西已经淡化了,但我们当时还拥有一个非常棒的司机社区,他们是品牌最坚定的拥护者。所以我们做的就是利用这个社区,搭建了一个本质上算是轻量级的供给侧上线引擎:我们付给我们最优秀的司机每次辅导 35 美元,所谓辅导环节本质上就是替代了原来的上线流程。简单来说,就是由另一位司机来查看你的车辆、检查所有文件、拍下你的驾照照片等等,然后带你进行一段短途试驾。这个做法带来的收益在各个方面都令人惊叹,甚至出乎我们的意料。首先,导师都是我们最优秀的司机,他们是品牌的传播者。所以他们会主动分享个人经验,告诉你什么时间、在哪里开车最合适。
**Benjamin Lauzier:**他们经常主动分享自己的联系方式。这给那些还在犹豫要不要让陌生人上自己车的新司机带来了巨大的杠杆效应和社会认同。其实挺有意思的,我们公司里最聪明的人在写最好的营销邮件和文案,什么”嘿,这周六出来开车吧”之类的。但这些司机、这些导师会说,“不不不,别听 Lyft 那帮人的,我告诉你该怎么做。周二下午两点上线,给我发短信,我告诉你哪里是好位置,这样你就能接到单。这样你就能赚大钱。“这种来自同行的认可,比我们说的任何话都有说服力得多。所以这对新司机的激活来说是一个非常、非常高效的杠杆。对我们来说,也是极其可扩展的。
我们可以派一个小团队飞到一个城市,严格筛选并上线大概 10 到 20 个顶级司机,然后他们就飞往下一个市场,其余的司机都由那些导师来完成上线。甚至对这些导师、这些顶级司机来说,这也是一种极大的认可杠杆。如果你是一个评分 4.9 的司机,跑的订单也够多,你就有机会成为导师,这为你提供了额外的收入来源。如果你一小时内做两个辅导环节,就能每小时赚 70 美元。如果你开车开累了,可以休息一下,做几个辅导环节就好。这感觉就像在工作中升职了一样。所以它实际上对我们最优秀司机的留存率产生了巨大的影响,这是出乎意料的。总之有非常多非常有趣的好处,我们实际上还进一步投入,围绕这个模式做了几个很有意思的变体。但正是这套体系让我们能用 Uber 十分之一甚至二十分之一的资源,以惊人的速度覆盖了 Uber 大部分的市场版图。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这个故事太精彩了,而且这是一个非常棒的杠杆,我完全同意,我几乎没见别人用过,我也很好奇为什么没人用。我听到的是,它成本更低,司机也在赚钱。我猜由导师培训出来的司机最终会成为更好的司机——我们在 Airbnb 也看到了类似的情况,通过推荐进入的房东最终会成为更好的房东,不管原因是什么。而你说的基本上是,这就是让你们在规模小得多、融资少得多的情况下能够与 Uber 竞争的原因。太厉害了。
**Benjamin Lauzier:**没错。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**你刚才说有好几个变体。有什么有意思的可以分享吗?基于这个成功你们后续做了哪些东西?
从导师计划到招募者计划
**Benjamin Lauzier:**这个旅程的下一步是这样的——我们当时疯狂增长,但激活环节开始出现裂缝。更准确地说,是大量的人在激活之前就流失了。他们没有输入社保号,没有提供正确的信息让我们在上线流程的前序步骤中完成各项核查。所以我们组建了一个数百人的客户经理团队,他们的工作就是拿起电话给这些司机打电话。然后我们有了同样的”顿悟时刻”——能不能让我们最优秀的司机来替我们做这件事,让他们也参与进来?于是我们真的这么做了,上线了另一个角色。我们称之为”招募者”。作为招募者,作为司机,你只需要在路面没什么单的时候打开手机,就会看到一个迷你销售面板,你可以认领线索。
这是一个在漏斗中流失的司机,你有他的电话号码,可以直接给他打电话或发短信。同样的道理,这些人的表现超过了我们经过严格培训的最优秀的销售人员。因为不是说”嘿,我是 Lyft 的 Ben,出来接单吧”,而是”嘿,我叫 James,我也是个司机。Lyft 告诉我你的申请还没完成,有什么问题吗?要不要我去你家,咱们一起搞定?“我们给他们每人 20 美元的转化佣金,每转化一个激活的司机。所以这对我们来说是极其可扩展的模式,也是另一种奖励和认可我们最优秀司机的方式。
它还提供了一种非常有趣的方式来平抑供需波动。像 Lyft 这样的市场平台的问题在于,需求有巨大的峰谷差异。每个人想在周二下午两点开车,但每个人想在周六凌晨两点叫车。那么如何在低利用率时段制造需求?这就是一个很好的方法。现在你可以在路上等待的时候仍然赚钱,只要坐在车里等下一单就行了。所以这是这个模式的又一个很酷的迭代。
回望 Lyft 与 Uber 之战
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太厉害了,真的太酷了。我能想象那种团队里想出这个点子然后看到它奏效时的感觉,一定非常棒。就是那种”天哪,看看这个,看看我们能用供给侧做多少酷事”的感觉。有个话题我本来没打算聊,但听你这么一说可能挺有意思,想听听你的看法。我一直以来都是 Lyft 的超级粉丝,从最早期就是。Lyft 在旧金山第一个周末上线的时候我就用了,当时大概只有五个司机,那还是个 beta 测试。我认识一个在 Lyft 早期工作的人,当时就觉得”天哪,Lyft 太棒了”。我完全站在 Lyft 这边,Uber 糟透了,我讨厌它。我想碰拳头,想给它装上那个胡须标志,太好了。但今天我看了看市值——Uber 市值 1500 亿美元,Lyft 市值 50 亿美元。我很好奇你对此有什么看法。感觉 Uber 在这个阶段已经赢了,我不知道 Lyft 接下来会怎么走。我知道你的心在 Lyft 那边,你在 Lyft 工作了很多年,我知道看到事情发展到今天这样可能感觉不太好。我想听听你的看法——回顾过去,你觉得 Uber 做对了什么让他们基本上赢了?你觉得 Lyft 接下来会怎样?Lyft 仍然值 50 亿美元,这仍然是一个巨大的、了不起的成功企业,但你认为接下来会怎样?
**Benjamin Lauzier:**嗯,我觉得一切走下坡路就是从我离开公司开始的。开玩笑的。不过我还是要先说明,我已经很多年没有近距离接触过 Lyft 的业务和战略了,所以请对我的观点打个折扣。这只是我非常粗浅的看法。但我觉得,对 Lyft 业务最大的打击可能某种程度上是内在的——来自它的愿景。Lyft 的愿景一直锚定在交通出行上,即人的运输。创始人们对运送人这件事充满热情,他们渴望改变人们在城市中出行的方式。他们想要改变城市的设计方式、道路的设计方式。所以这意味着要投资动态班车之类的项目,在这方面做了大量实验。但也正因如此,Lyft 从未投资过外卖配送、货物运输之类的业务。
**Benjamin Lauzier:**我觉得这在疫情期间基本上给他们带来了沉重打击。我记得 Uber 在某个阶段的口号大概是”moving in bits and atoms”之类的。但我觉得这暗含了一个理念,即做一个全球资产的物流平台——运送人、运送物、运送一切。他们在卡车、外卖配送以及各种 Lyft 从未打算涉足的领域投入了大量资金。这甚至不是因为资源不足,而是因为这些在一定程度上偏离了我们的愿景。我们想要改变人们城市出行的方式,想要重新发明公共交通,而不是去做一个 DoorDash 的竞争对手,在疫情期间帮你送甜甜圈。另一个很大一部分投入是拼车。这同样是在回答如何重新发明公共交通的问题——每一辆车都是一辆动态巴士,现在有了一条巴士线路,这条线路始终在运行,始终经过你家门口。所以我们大量的投资和思考都投向了这个方向。而疫情中人们最不想做的就是和五个陌生人坐在一辆车里,人们想要的是食物送到家门口。所以我知道 Lyft 的业务在疫情期间遭受了巨大打击,而 Uber 由于业务多元化,恢复得快得多。有意思的是,Lyft 后来实际上砍掉了拼车业务,而这曾经是他们身份认同的核心。他们是第一个推出拼车的。新的 COO 砍掉了拼车,说实话我对此非常难过。这表明他们现在有了一个非常不同的愿景,一个非常不同的业务方向。嗯,大概这就是我的看法吧。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**有意思。所以本质上,疫情真的把他们坑了,因为他们的战略一直围绕交通出行,当没人需要坐车、人人都想要外卖的时候,Uber 在战略上做了一个非常正确的决定——扩展到外卖配送领域,我记得很长一段时间里外卖的体量甚至超过了出行。我不确定现在 Uber 那边是什么情况,而 Lyft 没有这项业务,要从那种低谷中恢复过来非常困难。所以听起来像是战略把 Lyft 指向了一个特定方向,而世界的大环境又让这条路变得异常艰难——
**Benjamin Lauzier:**还失去了我。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**还失去了 Ben。你是 2019 年 3 月离开的,那是他们上市的时候吗?
**Benjamin Lauzier:**不是因为 IPO。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**对,然后之后就走下坡路了。然后——
**Benjamin Lauzier:**我说的没错吧。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**疫情期间其实有过一次回升,应该是人们又开始打车了,然后又跌了下去。所以我觉得这里有相关性,结论就是——千万别开除 Ben,别让 Ben 走。这就是我们的结论。
**Benjamin Lauzier:**我没被开除,说明一下。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好的,离开一家公司有很多种方式,别让任何一种发生。
**Benjamin Lauzier:**我知道,我开玩笑的。
在欧洲做产品
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好,在结束之前我还想聊两个话题。一个是你在欧洲的工作,你是一位在欧洲的产品领导者,我想听听在欧洲做产品是什么样的体验。第二个是聊聊你的创业项目。现在没人能开除了你了,你在运营自己的公司,我想花点时间聊聊。通常我们不会在这类话题上花时间,但你在做的事情非常酷,我觉得会以一种非常有意义的方式帮助到很多人。所以想花点时间聊聊。不过在那之前,你现在住在法国。在创业之前,你在法国面试过 CPO 的职位,你和很多法国公司、欧洲公司有合作。我很好奇你注意到法国和欧洲科技公司的文化与美国相比有什么不同?
**Benjamin Lauzier:**这段经历非常有意思。我的整个职业生涯都在美国,现在才刚开始了解欧洲市场,尤其是法国市场到底是什么样。我目前的观察是,产品管理在欧洲这些年确实蓬勃发展,但市场动态仍然很不一样。在美国,市场天然就具有很高的流动性和活力。这是我的解读——我觉得这带来了各层级人员和产品的更强的主人翁意识和责任感。产品经理和领导者加入一家创业公司,立刻就会负责一块相对有分量的业务,而且往往拥有真正的自主权。不是每次都这样,但我认为大部分情况下是这样的。如果结果不理想,大家的预期是你会被优化掉。LinkedIn 上有无数关于科技公司 CPO 任期的梗图来说明这一点。
而在法国,市场的流动性要低得多,换工作极其困难,解雇一个人的成本也非常高。所以除了显而易见的职业安全感之外,这似乎导致了两个效应。一是产品经理往往拥有更少的自主权和主人翁意识,受到的微观管理更多一些。他们也不像在美国那样更多地被视为业务负责人。我看到创始人和管理者更难以放手,这在某种程度上也是可以理解的,因为你没有像在美国那样强的掌控力。所以你会看到很多非常有意思的现象。
创业公司倾向于等更久才招聘,尤其是在产品岗位上。产品这门手艺的认可度也略低一些。法国有很多优秀的产品经理,但在这群实践者之外,对这门手艺的认知度有所不同。你还会看到很多很有意思的外包现象——各种规模的创业公司和公司在依赖优秀的产品工作室,比如 Mozza,来端到端地从零搭建产品。这非常非常有趣。我观察到的另一个方面是,在法国商业对技术的压倒性主导。
法国没有美国那种对技术和软件工程的崇拜。法国的常春藤是商学院,比如 HEC,最被看重的技能是管理和商业方面的软技能。这和硅谷那种计算机科学学位、斯坦福辍学生的刻板印象截然不同。而且由于我刚才提到的那些因素——流动性更低的就业市场,以及流动性更低的金融市场——我观察到的最后一件有意思的事也和主人翁意识有关,那就是股权在法国的意义要小得多。在我交流过的产品领导者中,大多数人都认为自己的股权几乎一文不值。没有人认识任何靠公司股权付了购房首付的人。
股权文化与法国创业生态
所以,股权被当作一个不错的额外福利,但不像在美国加入创业公司时那样——它是主人翁身份的象征和未来财富的承诺。对于高管职位,我认为股权通常只占总薪酬的不到 10%,而在美国,你薪酬的 50% 以上往往是股权。所以这种动态关系很有意思,但同样令人兴奋的是,我看到法国的创业文化如此蓬勃。这里有真正激动人心的创新正在发生,尤其是在 AI 领域。你看到很多法国公司走在前沿,比如 Mistral AI、Hugging Face 等等。
同样令人振奋的是,政府也在积极推动,将其作为创新的催化剂。法国政府已经承诺投入大约 25 亿美元资金,以支持到 2030 年法国在 AI 领域的卓越发展。他们正在运营很多政府内部的孵化器,试图从内部颠覆一些政府职能,并且正在招聘顶尖人才来做这件事。我见过一些从事这项工作的人,真的非常令人着迷。这让我对联邦层面的创业计划——去重新发明[听不清]——会是什么样子感到非常兴奋。所以,看到整个领域的面貌以及它和美国的差异,确实非常令人兴奋。
Lenny Rachitsky: 非常有趣。我知道欧洲也有 AI 监管,感觉挺奇怪的,但那是欧盟层面的,不是法国特有的。
Benjamin Lauzier: 对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 大家对此并不兴奋。欧洲对 AI 有很多恐惧,所以有很多监管方面的讨论。
Benjamin Lauzier: 我是个重度 Android 用户,像 Gemini 和类似的功能很多只在美国可用。现在我到了法国,确实能感受到这种差别。
文化差异的根源
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思。你刚才提到的这些文化差异,你觉得根源在于人们不经常换工作,还是在于文化本身?是人们没有像美国那样在产品角色中学习如何工作?你觉得这些差异的根本原因是什么?
Benjamin Lauzier: 我也不太确定,这是个好问题。我的看法——我确信这个看法非常天真和简化,而且我知道这是我的一条核心原则,所以我肯定在这上面也有一些隧道视野——但我看到的一个最大差异,确实围绕着主人翁意识和问责制这个概念。在美国,我亲眼见过,我相信你在 Airbnb 也见过,你在很多公司都能看到——不是所有地方,但很多公司会招聘你,把一大块业务交给你,然后由你来证明自己。你有六个月、一年的时间,由你来展示影响力。而我认为法国的雇佣模式不太有利于这种动态,因为就业制度要僵化得多。
所以你很少看到”先招人再证明自己”的模式,更多是”先证明自己再被录用”。而如果你作为创始人招错了人,你可能就会对自己的愿景变得有些保守。你会想更多地亲力亲为,因为你招错了人。这并不是说对方不优秀,只是意味着你会更多地介入产品经理的日常工作,可能还会想:“嗯,也许我不需要认同我愿景的产品经理,我招项目经理就好了。“所以这种环境可能更容易催生这类动态。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你的意思是,这部分是因为在法国和欧洲解雇人更难?
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,我认为是这样。不过要澄清的是,不仅仅是解雇的问题,我认为在文化上,这个市场的流动性和活力都要低得多。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以人们不会那么频繁地流动,会在一个地方待很长时间。
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,没错。
Lenny Rachitsky: 明白了。听起来还有一种文化差异,就是创始人天生就更倾向于”我来掌控,我不会招人然后信任你去承担这件事,我自己来主导。“这基本上就是 Paul Graham 说的”创始人模式”——已经根植于每个人心中了。
Benjamin Lauzier: 也许吧,可能有一点。我还觉得这也是一种商业文化,一种非常以商业为中心的文化。这也很合理——市场上风险投资更少,金融市场中的股权也更少。所以当你融资时,你需要有强有力的商业论证。商业论证是你习惯思维的核心。而我认为在美国,很多时候——这有点刻板印象——但存在一种非常以技术或产品为中心的世界观,或者说可以是这样:这是这个产品,这是产品的愿景,有时候甚至连商业模式都是后面再跟着来的。而在法国,我认为商业模式必须放在最前面、最中心的位置,也许这样你才能融到风险投资,才能生存下去。所以这意味着它吸引了很多有商业头脑的创业者,远远多于有技术头脑或产品头脑的创业者。
给欧洲公司的建议
Lenny Rachitsky: 明白了。如果有人想帮助自己在欧洲、在法国的公司更接近美国公司的运作方式,你有什么建议吗?我知道你和欧洲很多公司交流合作,你帮助他们改变什么、看到什么不同的东西?
Benjamin Lauzier: 好问题。我还没有完全破解这个问题,我认为这是一个非常难的问题。我可以给一些小的建议,至少对我交流过的一些公司有帮助。第一点是股权。我接触的很多创始人有意愿给员工股权,但因为这在文化中还没有扎根,我认为员工也对股权缺乏足够的重视。比如:“嗯,是挺好,但谁知道会发生什么。反正我只是给 CEO 打工的。“主人翁意识——还是回到这个概念——比你在美国能感受到的要弱。
所以我认为要在这方面加大投入,围绕股权做教育。其实在美国也一样,我相信 80% 的人并不完全理解自己的股权。但我认为在欧洲尤其需要在这方面着力,帮助人们理解自己股权的价值,通过讲述更多关于业务的故事、业务的发展轨迹、为什么股权对他们的未来有意义来帮助他们。我觉得任何在这方面做的事情,都有助于培养人们更强的主人翁心态。
然后,我认为另一个重要的方面——至少对我来说,这是打造成功产品团队的一个关键配方——就是构建围绕主人翁意识和问责制理念的团队。这些团队明确地拥有——不一定非得是很大的一块——业务的一个切面,而不是那种只负责发布某个功能比如”客人”功能的特性团队。这些团队要有明确的问责,有后果,但同时也要有清晰的自主权和发挥空间,让他们做到最好并蓬勃发展。
Benjamin 的创业项目
Lenny Rachitsky: 通常我不会花时间在这种事情上,但我真的觉得你正在做的事情非常酷,我认为对很多人来说会非常有意义。所以我想花几分钟时间,让你有机会谈谈你目前正在做的事情。你创办了一家公司,这是你创办的第一家公司吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是第一家。
创业经历与 Nurra Health
Benjamin Lauzier: 第一家正式的公司。不算接项目的话,但确实是第一家。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,注册了 LLC、C Corp,总之是正式注册了,有文件的那种。太棒了。聊聊你在做什么,怎么让大家知道怎么找到它、适不适合自己。
Benjamin Lauzier: 好的。我得说创业是一段非常令人谦卑的旅程。我认为从零到一比我们之前做过的任何事情都要难得多。当你习惯了在公司内部搭建和扩展产品时,你会觉得理所当然——至少我是这样——你会把问题空间已经被验证这件事视为理所当然。你有一定的品牌资产,即使你推出一个新垂直领域,也已经有现成的用户群,整个问题空间也已经被验证过了。我觉得真正从零开始,至少对我来说,感觉非常令人窒息和孤独,但同时也超级令人兴奋,有大量高度浓缩的学习。这是一段非常有趣的旅程。至于我为什么会走上这条路——大约三年前,我妻子开始出现一些健康问题,这也是我们去年决定搬到法国的部分原因,打算就去几年。她一直有一种未确诊的病症和慢性疼痛。我们亲眼目睹了在美国管理她的治疗和应对医疗体系是多么噩梦般的经历。我们要等三个月才能约到神经科医生,然后见面可能只有八分钟。美国的平均问诊时间在十到十二分钟之间。他们会抛出一堆术语,说”各项检查结果都正常,抱歉,你应该去看另一位专科医生。“然后再等三个月,看另一位专科医生。你可以想象,带着大量的焦虑和痛苦,所有这些加在一起,你又得到一个八分钟的时间段,然后对方说”哦,为什么那个神经科医生没做这项检查?我可以帮你,我们来理一理。“所以整个经历让人感到极度孤立。整个过程我们只是觉得完全孤立无援。
就像只有我们和 Google 一样。我们觉得医生们不断给出相互矛盾的建议。我把所有时间都花在研究专科医生、考虑哪些方案值得尝试上,整晚整晚地读论文,去搞清楚”针对这种医生们似乎不太了解的特定疗法,学术界的共识是什么?“在整个过程中,感觉没有人真正站在她这边。医疗体系内没有人在为她争取,而二十年前你的家庭医生可能会为你争取——他了解你的一切,会说”Lenny,我们来聊聊这个,我知道你叔叔有过这种情况”。那种来自家庭医生的代言感,如今已经不存在了。一个医生有几千名病人、每年每人只看几分钟,这并不罕见。
深入了解之后,我们意识到这不是个例。近一半的美国人至少患有一种慢性病,或者需要独自应对某种复杂的健康问题。你会看到很多围绕慢性病或慢性疼痛的大型在线社区,人们在那里试图搞清楚状况、为自己争取权益。我想明确一点,在我看来问题显然不在从业者身上,而是系统性的。是来自私募股权公司日益增长的资金压力,还有无数其他因素。你会看到医生们不堪重负、过度劳累、逐渐倦怠,而且这种压力只增不减。所以基本上,接下来的六个月我就一直在和数百位患者、医生以及专家交流。我们搭建的从根本上说是一个帮助人们为自己的健康而战的平台。
我们希望缩小患者与医疗体系之间的鸿沟。系统中缺失了一个关键层级——人们在很大程度上只能靠 Google 来应对危及生命或令人衰弱的疾病,到了某个时刻你只是厌倦了为自己争取。所以我们将患有复杂疾病的人与他们专属的健康倡导者对接起来。本质上就像是他们专属的健康助手。全天候在线,帮助你应对治疗过程中的各种事务。我们帮你找预约、帮你准备就诊、帮你解读诊断和检查结果。我们花数小时研究解决方案和可能的治疗方案,更广泛地说,我们尽一切努力帮助你更好地为自己争取。几周前我们在美国推出了早期版本,到目前为止用户的参与度真的、真的、真的令人惊叹。我们在帮助癌症患者、患有各种小众慢性病的人,甚至在帮他们追着医生办公室催”嘿,我们还没收到那个转诊呢”。
所有那些你在面对那么多预约、需要管理这种病症时已经疲于应付的事情。我们的思维模式是:如果这个用户是我们的伴侣或父母,我们会怎么做?你可能会花整晚翻阅研究资料。你会给全州的医疗机构打电话问”嘿,谁有空?“如果接下来两个月都没有理疗师有空,我们会帮你找到一个更早的。所以本质上我们正在搭建大规模运转的引擎,让人们感到他们并不孤独、有人在为他们争取。
Lenny Rachitsky: 真的非常酷。可悲的是我们确实需要这样的东西,但确实需要,因为医疗体系实在不够理想。所以基本上就是有一个站在你这边的、了解内部运作的人在流程中帮助你。公司叫什么名字,大家在哪里可以找到它?
Benjamin Lauzier: 叫 Nurra Health,网站是 Nurra,N-U-R-R-A.me。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,我们会在节目笔记里附上链接。先说明一下,我不是投资人,我只是对这件事感到兴奋。我认为很多人需要这个。回到我们之前聊的话题,这不是一个市场平台。你怎么描述这门生意与市场平台公司的关系?
Benjamin Lauzier: 我们暂时忽略了市场平台动态。我在践行自己的建议——先激活市场平台的一侧,即健康倡导者这一侧,目前我们只专注于我认为对我们来说最难的那一侧,那就是需求侧。我们怎么找到这些人?怎么为他们创造正确的价值主张?这就是我们目前专注的事情。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以我听到的是,未来可能会有市场平台的成分?
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,没错。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思。非常酷。Ben,在我们进入非常令人期待的快问快答环节之前,还有什么想分享的、想提的、想留给听众的吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 没有了,谢谢。
快问快答
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我们到了非常令人期待的快问快答环节。Ben,准备好了吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 准备好了,开始吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。第一个问题:你最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么?
Benjamin Lauzier: 我从不同方向推荐几本。第一本是《Misbehaving: The Makings of Behavioral Economics》(《不当行为:行为经济学的形成》)。我对行为经济学很感兴趣,喜欢经济学与人类心理学交叉的这个领域。这和产品有很大的相似性,所以这是一本很好的入门读物。第二本我经常推荐的书是 David Epstein 写的《Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World》(《范围:通才如何在专业化的世界中胜出》)。我一直对很多事情感到好奇,但这也让我觉得自己在很多方面还算行,但没有一样是真正擅长的。我什么都不是特别精通。所以在职业生涯中,我看到那些钢琴家,周末还在机器学习领域里做专家、主持学术会议、为智库做贡献,我就觉得自己只是个通才。
所以如果你也有这种感觉,这本书能让你对自己好受一些,缓解你的冒名顶替综合征。至少对我来说是这样的。最后一本跟商业完全无关——《Immune》,作者是 Philipp Dettmer。他是 YouTube 频道 Kurzgesagt 的创始人,不知道我发音对不对,但那是一个科学频道。如果你对自己的身体如何运作、免疫系统如何运作哪怕有一丁点好奇,这是一本非常精彩的书,读起来真的很有趣,非常引人入胜,生物学内容出色,而且读起来很愉快,我保证。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我一直想邀请《Range》的作者上播客,但还没成功。所以如果有人认识他,他姓 Epstein 对吧?是吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,David Epstein。
Lenny Rachitsky: David Epstein,请帮我引荐一下。我很想邀请他来播客。我很喜欢他传达的信息,基本上就是说最成功的人——还是说他想表达的是你应该做个通才,或者说作为通才也能非常成功?这是他的核心观点吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 作为通才也能非常成功。对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,很好。我完全同意。我也是这样的人。下一个问题:你最近有没有特别喜欢、觉得非常好看的电影或电视剧?
Benjamin Lauzier: 电视剧的话,我最近没看到什么让我震撼的,但我分享一个”新的旧爱”吧。我最近重温了《The Last of Us》(《最后生还者》),这是一部我一直很喜欢的作品。我非常喜欢这部剧。我也喜欢原版游戏,很多年前玩过,剧也很棒。
Lenny Rachitsky: 下一季到底什么时候出啊?我很期待。因为我知道游戏还有更多内容——
Benjamin Lauzier: 2025年。
Lenny Rachitsky: 2025年。天啊,好久啊。好吧,至少知道了。下一个问题:你最近有没有发现一个特别喜欢的产品?
Benjamin Lauzier: 可能有点跟风了,但我最近非常喜欢 Arc 浏览器。不知道你用没用过,但——
Lenny Rachitsky: 哦,我超爱 Arc。它是我排名第一的主力浏览器。绝对的,我非常喜欢。
Benjamin Lauzier: 太棒了。所以你全都了解了。是的,用起来真的很开心。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,光说 Arc 浏览器的上线流程,本身就是一堂关于上线的课程。他们做得太好了。作为产品人,光去看看他们怎么做上线就非常值得。
Benjamin Lauzier: 我当时想,我已经用了 12 年 Chrome,或者不知道多少年了,感觉要改变我的整个使用习惯摩擦力会很大。结果八秒钟就搞定了,感觉就像回到家一样。我当时想,“哇,这比我预期的快太多了。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 还有两个问题。你有没有一个经常回想起来的座右铭,或者会反复对自己说、分享给朋友家人的话?
Benjamin Lauzier: 遗憾的是我没有什么特别有哲学深度的座右铭。我在某个地方住了几年。我现在住在法国阿尔卑斯山区,所以我家有一个相框,上面写着 John Muir 的名言:“The mountains are calling and I must go.”(群山在召唤,我必须出发。)我觉得这就是我的安身之处。山是我的快乐之所,所以我不太在工作中提起这些。我不会在会议中途突然说”群山在召唤,我必须出发”。但这确实是一个让我安定下来的座右铭吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这句话真好。光听到这句话我的神经系统就放松了。而且我知道你住在法国的山区,你已经听从了召唤。最后一个问题。你住在法国,奥运会刚在巴黎举办。你去现场看过比赛吗?有没有在电视上看?关于离你不远的这届奥运会,有什么让你印象深刻的吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 好问题。遗憾的是我没有去看任何现场比赛。对我来说最大的亮点可能是——我是一个很大的山地自行车爱好者——在自行车领域,我很喜欢男子 BMX 那场比赛,领奖台上三位都是法国人,所以这对法国来说是一个伟大的时刻。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我都不知道那是奥运项目。所以是 BMX,就是那种越野摩托车式的比赛?
Benjamin Lauzier: 对,对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太酷了。好的。Ben,非常感谢你来参加。
最后两个问题:大家在网上哪里可以找到你?还有什么你在做的事情是大家可以关注的?听众怎样能帮到你?
Benjamin Lauzier: 好的,大家可以通过两种方式找到我。第一件可能对大家有帮助的是,我在 Reforge 上有一门课程,如果你对市场平台感兴趣,想深入研究市场平台的增长,我在 Reforge 上有一门课。我们现在大概在做第五或第六期了。课程进行得非常好,我们和非常多非常酷的市场平台合作过,把我们刚才聊到的很多话题讲得更深入。所以如果你对市场平台感兴趣,可以去看看。
Lenny Rachitsky: 顺便问一下,这个课程的理想学员是谁?是创始人,还是在大型市场平台公司做产品经理的人?最适合什么样的人?
Benjamin Lauzier: 我们既有创始人也有产品经理,还有产品负责人。但我强烈建议,应该是已经找到产品市场契合的人。根据我们刚才的讨论,如果你还没有达到产品市场契合,先等一等再报名这个课程。先专注于你的核心业务,再去操心市场平台的动态问题。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,我刚才打断了你,你还有其他想推荐的吗?
Benjamin Lauzier: 哦对,还有我们正在建设的公司 Nurra。如果你自己或者你认识的人有慢性病或复杂疾病,如果你觉得在管理自己的健康和就医过程中需要帮助,我们很乐意提供帮助,了解你需要什么,以及我们如何能帮到你。我们的网站是 Nurra.me,N-U-R-R-A.me。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那听众怎样才能帮到你呢?
Benjamin Lauzier: 如果你有建议,如果你认识这个领域的人,如果你想了解更多这方面的内容,如果你有经验教训,如果你对这个领域有任何了解,我很愿意倾听。如果你对市场平台有什么尖锐的观点,如果你不同意我今天说的任何内容,我也很想听到。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢这个态度。Ben,非常感谢你来参加。
Benjamin Lauzier: 非常感谢邀请我,这是梦想成真。终于上了这个播客。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我也是,Ben,我也同样期待。大家再见。非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期内容有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的能帮助更多听众发现这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Ambassador program | 大使计划 |
| Bookings | 预约订单 |
| CPO | 首席产品官 |
| CS degree | 计算机科学学位 |
| Evangelist | 传播者/布道者 |
| Fill rate | 需求成交率 |
| Flywheel | 增长飞轮 |
| Founder mode | 创始人模式 |
| Growth levers | 增长杠杆 |
| Guardrails | 护栏 |
| HEC | HEC(巴黎高等商学院) |
| Leads | 线索 |
| Liquidity | 流动性 |
| Managed marketplace | 托管型市场平台 |
| Marketplace | 市场平台 |
| Mentor session | 辅导环节 |
| Mentorship program | 导师计划 |
| Onboarding | 上线 |
| Peak-end effect | 峰终效应 |
| Pink mustaches | 粉色胡须标志 |
| PMs | 产品经理 |
| Product channel fit | 产品渠道契合 |
| Product market fit | 产品市场契合 |
| Ride along | 试驾/随车陪同 |
| Sean Ellis test | Sean Ellis 测试 |
| Semi-managed marketplace | 半托管型市场平台 |
| Supply crunch | 供给紧缺 |
| Supply gap | 供给缺口 |
| Supply side | 供给方/供给侧 |
| Tunnel vision | 隧道视野 |
| Unmanaged marketplace | 非托管型市场平台 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)