We tried hackathons, enlisting interns, and testing new products ( Wishlist, I’m looking at you), but we never quite built up the momentum to get it going. Unfortunately, I was terrible at selling the idea, and for five years, nothing happened. This was less common in Western markets, which made it a blind spot for many of those at the company. In fact, in many early research studies, more than half of people studied in many countries cited Facebook as a place they had bought or sold things. Social networking was not simply about sharing with friends in many places, especially in emerging markets, commerce was a core part of the “ jobs to be done ” on Facebook. It seemed inevitable that social commerce would be an important part of the company and its products. I knew I wanted to build commerce into Facebook from the moment I walked into my first interview. To learn more from Deb, definitely subscribe to her newsletter, and follow her on LinkedIn. She also sits on the board of Intuit and is the author of the soon-to-be-released book Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work (I’ve already pre-ordered it and so should you ). Deb left Facebook about a year ago and is now the CEO of Ancestry. During her 11 years at Facebook/Meta, she also led teams that built Facebook Login, Facebook Pay, Facebook Commerce Manager, and dozens of other foundational Facebook products. There is no better human alive to tell this story than Deb Liu, and below, for the first time, Deb shares the story behind Facebook Marketplace.ĭeb led the team that pitched, built, launched, and scaled Facebook Marketplace from just an idea to what it is today. For years, I’ve been curious to learn what it took to make Facebook Marketplace work, when so many local marketplaces (including Facebook’s previous attempts) have failed. It’s ahead of Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, Taobao, and has quietly left the once-unconquerable Craigslist in the dust. I recently learned that Facebook Marketplace is the world’s second-largest marketplace, in terms of monthly active users, behind only Amazon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |