On the 24th of April 2018, the trains in France were on strike, again. Strikes have practical implications on passengers that include being stranded, missing work or a family reunion, taking a much longer route, or squeezing into one of the few trains which are still running. However, over the last few years, a platform has considerably contributed to minimizing the inconvenience caused by such events: BlaBlaCar. BlaBlaCar connects drivers and passengers and helps them share the costs of journeys. On that day, Fred plays the role of a driver and takes on board a retired couple who were using BlaBlaCar for the first time. He listens to their complaints about the railroad service but also to the difficulties they encountered when signing up on BlaBlaCar. As they did not have a Facebook account, they created one before they could sign up on the platform. It took them a while to complete all the formalities. In the end, they are delighted to be in the car with Fred, on the way to see their grandchildren. Fred listens carefully and thinks of the solutions that could improve their experience. This is because Fred is no ordinary member of the BlaBlaCar community. In fact, Fred is the founder of the company. He uses every trip as an opportunity to understand consumers’ needs and concerns better and think of the solutions and/or possible innovations. Around 15 years before that day, in December 2003, Fred Mazzella was trying to go to his hometown in the Vendée region in the west of France to spend Christmas with his family. All trains were fully booked during the busy period, and no seats were available until after Christmas. Eventually, he managed to convince his sister to pick him up from Paris, a major detour for the sibling who lived in Normandy. As he was driving with her on the highway, he saw a train that he wanted to take. It was indeed overbooked with all seats occupied. At the same time, whizzing past his car were hundreds of cars that were mostly empty except for the drivers. It was a eureka moment! In 2006, Fred purchased the domain name Covoiturage.fr (French for ‘car sharing’) and along with Nicolas and Francis founded a company called Comuto…that would soon become BlaBlaCar. This brief history gives us some elements to reflect on. First of all, as we have seen in other cases, the platform was born from a simple need of its founder who identified a friction in the market. But above all, I'd like to highlight a passage, perhaps missed by some, that emerges from the very first words of this video: the passengers Fred met on his journey were an elderly couple who was going to visit their grandchildren during a strike...and who had to create two Facebook accounts in order to join the platform. Well, if we were going back to the mid-2000s, when Fred was actively working on creating the platform, it would have been hard to imagine that a few years later elderly people would be using BlaBlaCar to get around. Why? Let's say meeting someone via a smartphone...and accepting a ride from an unknowing non. The kind of activity that, only in the early 2000s, would have not convinced millions of people, for a very simple reason: lack of trust. This is the most important element that emerges from this story: the platform worked hard to enable trust between the two parties. They put in the verification of Facebook profiles to put a face to the passengers, they added the request for specific information on the driving license, they manage the money transfer and keep it safe until the end of the ride...a series of small actions that allowed BlaBlaCar to generate trust from the two sides of customers towards the platform, but also between them. They worked so hard on it that they created a proprietary framework, which is called DREAMS, to indicate all the elements built into the platform to manage trust. In other words, the platform has been actively working to create value, generating and enabling trust in the system, in spite of those who believe that a platform does nothing...and that after identifying the friction to be solved...everything comes by itself. Going to create these platforms requires a particularly complex value proposition design effort. The platform must offer a value proposition for both sides. You need to design a value proposition for both the first and the second side, knowing that creating a link between the two will only be a solid starting point. You need to figure out what the real reason is that they will want to use the platform...and that the platform provider's job doesn't stop at creating the link between the two sides to meet. In order for the link to be meaningful, the platform provider has at least 4 drivers to work on: the first we have seen is trust, but with our research we have identified at least 3 others. Very often these platforms leverage digital tools that allow them to collect a lot of transaction data. Data that allow the platform provider to create add-ons, additional services, which become Data-Driven Value-Added Services for one of the two sides. Take Spotify, for example, which connects listeners to artists. Leveraging the data collected during the delivery of the basic service, they created a specific add-on service called Spotify for Artists, through which they offer each artist a set of insights into how listeners enjoy their songs, for how long, after how long they change songs, and so on. This becomes one more marginal reason to convince the artist to get on and stay on the platform. Another driver is related to the creation of a feeling of community, in this way we try to make the interaction with the platform continuous and repeated over time, going to feed the network externalities that exist between the two sides, as well as ensure a good number of customers on both sides. An example of this is offered by Airbnb, which often organizes gatherings of hosts with the aim of making them feel part of a large community. Finally, it is important to ensure that the quality of the possible matches between the two sides is so high that there is a sense of personalization in the match making between the two sides. Think for example of Netflix or again Spotify, in both cases, opening up two different user profiles, we would be faced with two completely different screens, customizing match suggestions with the other side based on prior experience on the platform. So we have four drivers, through which platforms create value: trust, data, sense of community and personalization. The interesting thing is that these four drivers are not independent of each other, but can leverage each other. What that means, for example greater trust will lead to a greater sense of community, which could lead to more interactions and therefore more data which could lead to better management of the personalization. These four drivers go on to define the DNA of these platforms, making the connection between the two sides not just a union, but a truly meaningful relationship for all the parties involved.
