Building a Great Marketplace
Frederic Mazzella Co-founder, BlaBlaCar
Frederic Mazzella, Co-Founder and CEO BlaBlaCar
Frederic Mazella is the CEO and Founder of BlaBlaCar, a peer-2-peer travel company which connects drivers with empty seats to people looking for a ride. BlaBlarCar was founded in 2006 and is a Lead Edge Capital portfolio company. Prior to BlaBlaCar, Frederic was a Project Manager at Kabira, a supplier of in-memory transactional platforms that power some of the world’s largest financial and telecommunications enterprises. Before joining Kabira, Frederic was a Research Assistant at NASA for three years.
Summary Notes on Building a Great Marketplace
- Building a great marketplace
- First thing to look at in marketplace
- The quality of service, ratings etc.
- What makes a great marketplace?
- Quality of service that each side provides to the other
- Drivers have to be good at providing service, punctual, friendly, rating mechanism
- Building trust with people who have never met
- Key metrics to monitor?
- Fill rate in the cars – how many seats have been sold vs. offered by drivers
- Wants any driver offering seats to get passengers
- Ratings and average of rating to make sure it’s high enough
- Monitor activity and how often riders and drivers come back
- Fill rate in the cars – how many seats have been sold vs. offered by drivers
- Advice to marketplace entrepreneurs
- Build a service you would use
- Frederic has been ridesharing for a long time and this helped shape the right experience to make sure it’s easy and efficient
- Since it takes a long time to build a marketplace, it’s a good goal to want to build a service you would use
- Make sure market is large
- Think about the opportunity and whether or not it is niche
- Need to have many people to participate in the network
- First thing to look at in marketplace