How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more

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.

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.

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.' 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.

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.

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?'

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.