My team writes about our weekly learning and share it in our team Slack Channel.
I wrote about my learning this week after this post and would like to share back with you as a thank-you note!
Deb Liu founded Facebook Marketplace (FM), the largest social e-Commerce platform outside China. Deb’s post has lots of highlights that are worth spotlighting, but the top ones that most resonate with me include:
- User behaviors and innovations outside the US inspire Deb to look into social commerce and form the early initiatives for FM. “Learning from NBU (Next Billing User) countries” is probably no longer news these days, but it was a pioneer thinking back in 2012.
- FM is a gigantic initiative from a historical perspective. Still, the early team started with something small — allowing FB groups to identify themselves as commerce groups, so Deb’s team can track and understand users’ organic behaviors through analysis. They understood who the users were (stores or individuals) and what they sold (from marble to car) and started to decide on experiments.
- The team experienced a significant pivot once after scalability became a bottleneck. After making a critical decision — a new tab or an app, the team focused on agreeing on a critical metric of weekly buyer retention, which is vital to guide and measure the success of this new bet.
In the end, Deb provided her top lessons learned of founding FM
- Follow the (user engagement) data to iterate and evolve the product
- Device matters — FM was mobile-first, but after observing desktop users’ significantly higher engagement in large purchases, the team focused more on the desktop version.
- Scaling was a new challenge after the initial expansion. The product experienced novel issues such as inauthentic goods, local “grey” areas, offline transactions that cannot be tracked easily by an online platform (really resonate with me with the UberEats cash transaction problem in NBUs). The team learned to be responsive to novel problems that are “branches” to the core product roadmap.
The story-telling in this post was fascinating. It was 10 minutes well-spent, and I would love to learn your key takeaways.
This story is a massive gem. The only thing that would supercharge this would be more specific numbers but I do understand sharing them may be sensitive.
My team writes about our weekly learning and share it in our team Slack Channel.
I wrote about my learning this week after this post and would like to share back with you as a thank-you note!
Deb Liu founded Facebook Marketplace (FM), the largest social e-Commerce platform outside China. Deb’s post has lots of highlights that are worth spotlighting, but the top ones that most resonate with me include:
- User behaviors and innovations outside the US inspire Deb to look into social commerce and form the early initiatives for FM. “Learning from NBU (Next Billing User) countries” is probably no longer news these days, but it was a pioneer thinking back in 2012.
- FM is a gigantic initiative from a historical perspective. Still, the early team started with something small — allowing FB groups to identify themselves as commerce groups, so Deb’s team can track and understand users’ organic behaviors through analysis. They understood who the users were (stores or individuals) and what they sold (from marble to car) and started to decide on experiments.
- The team experienced a significant pivot once after scalability became a bottleneck. After making a critical decision — a new tab or an app, the team focused on agreeing on a critical metric of weekly buyer retention, which is vital to guide and measure the success of this new bet.
In the end, Deb provided her top lessons learned of founding FM
- Follow the (user engagement) data to iterate and evolve the product
- Device matters — FM was mobile-first, but after observing desktop users’ significantly higher engagement in large purchases, the team focused more on the desktop version.
- Scaling was a new challenge after the initial expansion. The product experienced novel issues such as inauthentic goods, local “grey” areas, offline transactions that cannot be tracked easily by an online platform (really resonate with me with the UberEats cash transaction problem in NBUs). The team learned to be responsive to novel problems that are “branches” to the core product roadmap.
The story-telling in this post was fascinating. It was 10 minutes well-spent, and I would love to learn your key takeaways.
Thank you for your words of appreciation. I am happy that this was able to benefit you and your team!
This story is a massive gem. The only thing that would supercharge this would be more specific numbers but I do understand sharing them may be sensitive.
Insightful post into the product's trajectory. Thank you for sharing!