Ravi Mehta explains that whether to invest in reviews or internal ranking signals depends on your marketplace's stage and what users actually trust. Uber leaned heavily on driver and rider reviews early on, then shifted to safety features as the brand matured. For professional services like doctors, credentials matter more than reviews.
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Hey, Dimitri, do you wanna come on? Yeah, I have a question that kind of goes back to your TripAdvisor days and the review work that you were talking about and the importance of trust in marketplaces. So I think a lot of founders face this choice between improving the review system and making sure that works really well versus working on how, let's say, sellers are presented to customers, like, let's, through things like ranking or through matching. And if you're thinking about what would be the most fruitful path, is it to tinker with the review system, how ratings are displayed? stuff, or is it to take those internal signals and then feed them into the ranking machine, which sort of kind of places the burden of matching on the platform rather than the customer kind of digesting all the information that's in reviews and ratings?
I think it depends a lot on how important reviews are as a trust signal for your users. And that could change over time. You know, for example, Uber in the early days, reviews were absolutely critical. because people were trying this service for a new— for the first time. And so Uber would basically force you to review a driver, and then actually drivers would review riders, and they would show the reviews very prominently. And they needed that social proof as a way to create trust. But over time, there was enough brand awareness around Uber, there was enough comfort with it that reviews could take a backseat, and other things like some of the rider safety features improved, took increased importance in terms of the trust signal. So I think the question to answer is what is going to drive trust in our marketplace given where we are in our marketplace's lifecycle? And if that is social proof, then focusing on the reviews can be really important. But you might find that there's other things that are essential, right? So for example, for doctors, yes, part of it is social proof. People like to see that doctors have been well-reviewed, but their credentials are really important. The types of patients that they see are really important. So there's some other trust signals that are important. So for Sesame, for example, reviews are important, but they're not the most important thing to focus on in terms of discoverability and increasing conversion on the platform.
