Building a Great Marketplace

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

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