To deliver on our mission at Airtasker — to empower people to realise the full value of their skills — we need to work together with our Taskers to deliver awesome service to our customers. We can think of this as a partnership between us and our Taskers.
In this partnership, our role is to create opportunity by bringing customers to the Airtasker marketplace and then to provide Taskers with the infrastructure they need to deliver their service.
The role of our Taskers is to create content to respond to this opportunity (making offers and in the future listings) and then to be responsible for actually delivering the service to customers.
But how does this partnership look from the other side of the marketplace?
From the perspective of our customers: Airtasker is a product that enables our customers to get work done. Our product is the Airtasker marketplace.
We build software to empower customers to access liquidity through our marketplace — and for our customers, liquidity means a wide range of services, available times and prices offered by lots of Taskers (ie. awesomeness!)
This makes the job we do at Airtasker quite different compared to many other tech companies in which the product they build is simply the software itself. To create a great marketplace product we not only need to build great software, we also need to care deeply about liquidity.
Staging is everything
We all know what a successful marketplace looks like: awesome software that empowers lots of buyers and lots of sellers to sell lots of high quality services by generating a high degree of liquidity.
But because it inherently takes time to build liquidity, staging the development of a marketplace product is super critical and it’s important to remember:
- Our software without liquidity is of no value. Before we have created any liquidity, we don’t actually know what our product is and we don’t have a product to offer to our customers. So when building new products or opening new markets, it’s important to keep plans to drive liquidity top of mind. It’s also critical that we “trust first” and embrace the unknown since we won’t know how Taskers (or customers) could use our marketplace until they actually do.
- Our product evolves over time as liquidity builds. As more Taskers join the Airtasker community our range of services, speed of response and range of price points increases (albeit crappy behaviour can also increase too). This means that marketplace products usually get better over time — which attracts more customers, which in turn attracts more Taskers, which… you get the picture: a loop.
- Our ability to create more powerful incentives grows with time as liquidity builds. As our base of customers grows, we have more value to offer Taskers and thus have greater leverage to drive positive behaviour that leads to better customer outcomes. For example in a marketplace with low liquidity, we have less customers and therefore less value to offer to Taskers and as a consequence: Taskers are less likely to push through high friction processes (eg. ID verification, creating a video profile etc). On the other hand, in a marketplace with a high degree of liquidity, the opportunity to earn is greater so Taskers are more incentivised to go through higher friction processes that generate higher quality content and thus a greater customer experience: creating another marketplace growth loop.
So in wrapping up this article: to create a marketplace product that our customers love, we need to care about creating great liquidity just as much as we care about creating great software and it’s important to remember that since it inherently takes time to generate liquidity: staging marketplace development is everything.
