The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Thumbtack pros hated direct bookings because they preferred the thrill of sales
“We knew we're going to improve the ROI by something like 20%, maybe. And we lost this and pros hated it. They hated it because they actually subconsciously, like, they liked the spill of the sale, right? They loved this contact with customer. And they sometime…”
Lovinsky: Marketplaces should prioritize customers first because suppliers need quality demand
“Many marketplaces live and die by the quality and liquidity and supply. And so why would you know, focus on customers first in the thumbtack perspective and supply is, are the pros, the people that, that you hire? Well, you know, we always just felt that what …”
Johari: Major marketplace changes create winners and losers through reallocation
“You have to recognize when you run marketplaces that many of the changes that are most consequential create winners and losers. And rolling with those changes is about recognizing whether the winners you've created are more important to your business view than…”
Hockenmaier: Horizontal platforms beat vertical rivals on SEM via higher LTV
“And so our customer LTV was always higher and we would always win when we were bidding against those other customers on SEM keywords that were relevant to that category. So it's like, it becomes very hard to compete if you're picking off this kind of like narr…”
Service marketplaces face unique difficulties due to highly heterogeneous supplier preferences
“This is what's so tricky, by the way, about you know, services, service marketplaces like Thumbtack, because unlike eBay, where sellers, you know, they just want to sell very clear and distinct inventory. On Thumbtack, you have electricians who only want certa…”
Thumbtack jumpstarted its early supply by cross-posting customer requests to Craigslist
“You have countless businesses that have been built off of Craigslist. I think, you know, Thumbtack was partially, like, one of them. And the idea was like, hey, like, we can find, you know, all those great pros on Thumbtack. We can, when we have someone who wa…”
Early marketplace founders should prioritize building the hardest side first
“Which side to focus on is, like, there's different approaches to this, but generally people will pick the hardest side, and so if, you know for, I'll take the example of Thumbtack, because we're going to talk about it, so Thumbtack is a home services marketpla…”
Lovinsky: Thumbtack prioritized customers first, service pros second, and company last
“Like at Thumbtack, we had principles about which sides of the marketplace we wanted to serve In, in which order and kind of when we serve thumbtack, right? So it was customers first, pros second, and then thumbtack last.”
Lovinsky: Startups fail from loss of stamina before running out of money
“What kills most projects, most early companies is, is stamina. And I think that you know we all need to work on, you know, kind of being more resilient about kind of like, I remember at Thumbtack, Marco, the CEO, we used to say that it feels like we're running…”
Lovinsky: Incredible growth masks underlying product and operational problems
“Growth masks all problems. Like you don't really have an, I think, true understanding of like what is working well and what is not working well when you have like incredible growth.”
Thumbtack's optional smoke machine filter accidentally eliminated 95% of available DJ supply
“Unknowingly to them, obviously, like only five percent of our DJs had a smoke machine. And so you would carve out, like, 95% of our supply”