Sidecar's granular user filtering fragmented supply and drastically hurt service levels
Benjamin Lauzier · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack) · Sep 29, 2024 · at 27:55
Former Lyft supply lead Benjamin Lauzier discusses why ridesharing competitor Sidecar failed against Uber and Lyft.
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“I think one real 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, like, I want a car that's, you know, at least like, 2015 or newer. I want a driver that's at least like, you know, this or newer. And so I think the theory was, you know sort of reasonable on paper. It was like, Hey, let's give people like more control over it. You have those other players out there. You have Lyft and Uber and people you know, I feel sort of forced in this, like, 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, like, even further, right? And you have this, like, hyper fragmentation of your marketplace, and I think it hurts their, you know, their SLA is, like, quite drastically.”
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