Benjamin Lauzier
Benjamin Lauzier has been building and scaling marketplaces for almost 15 years. He was the VP of product and growth at Thumbtack, where he rebuilt the product team and Thumbtack’s growth levers, re-architected their revenue model, and helped double the company’s growth within three years. Prior to Thumbtack, Ben was at Lyft for six years, where he led the supply side of the product organization to a point where 1% of U.S. workers were driving for Lyft every month. Currently, he advises marketplace teams and founders, teaches a Reforge course on marketplace growth, and has recently launched a health tech company called Nurra, which connects users with care advocates to navigate the health-care system.
AI & Technology Skills
Effective platform management relies on setting quality guardrails and empowering supply rather than attempting total deterministic control.
"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 s..."
Growth Skills
Pre-product-market fit marketplaces should ignore complex marketplace dynamics and focus entirely on the core exchange of value and a growth strategy for one side.
"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 ex..."
Liquidity is best measured by the 'fill rate' of intentful demand, which represents the efficiency of the marketplace's matching engine.
"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... how many of those searches with intent actually turn into a t..."
A 'market health metric' is a leading indicator that predicts conversion and plateaus when the marketplace is healthy.
"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... For Lyft and for Uber, it was ETAs. So, we knew that if the closest d..."
Marketplaces require two distinct product-market fits, which can be measured using the Sean Ellis 'disappointment' survey for both supply and demand.
"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? ... consider that you have two product market fits esse..."
To kickstart a marketplace, identify the 'hard side' and use 'single-player mode' or external channel hacks to simulate the other side.
"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..."
Leveraging high-quality existing supply to onboard and mentor new supply creates a scalable, high-trust activation loop.
"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... the mentors were our very best drivers,..."
Turning existing supply into a distributed sales force can outperform professional sales teams due to peer-to-peer relatability.
"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..."
The guest provides a deep framework for identifying, measuring, and managing marketplace liquidity (fragmentation, uniform needs, fill rates, and market health metrics) that goes beyond general growth
"Liquidity is how marketplaces win. It's this measure of your ability to match buyers and sellers efficiently."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Labor market liquidity directly influences team culture; less liquid markets often result in lower autonomy and more micromanagement.
"In the U.S. I think you have this inherently very liquid and dynamic market. I think... it leads to greater ownership and accountability for people and product at all levels... In France the market is..."
High-performing cultures are built on teams that own business outcomes rather than just shipping features.
"Develop teams that revolve around this concept of ownership and accountability teams that are clearly owning a... slice of the business, not feature teams like shipping maybe guests, but teams that ha..."
Product Management Skills
A product vision that is too narrow (transporting people vs. logistics) can create existential risk during market shifts like COVID-19.
"Lyft's vision was always anchored around transportation, people of transportation... Uber had... this notion of being a logistics platform for assets in the world, for transporting people, for transpo..."
A strong problem definition identifies a 'missing layer' in a complex system (like healthcare) where users are currently forced to rely on inadequate tools (like Google).
"We connect people with complex conditions... with their own health advocate... we want to close the gap between patients and the healthcare system. There's this critical layer of the system that's mis..."