🧩 Partly co-founder Levi Fawcett on lessons from Rocket Lab, frameworks over processes and the step-by-step guide to building a marketplace

Wild Hearts

The step-by-step guide to building a marketplace with Levi Fawcett, Co-Founder of Partly.

• How making mistakes can lead to finding the right problem
• Realising that New Zealand can compete with the Silicon Valley's
• The importance of learning the process vs. framework distinction
• Building conviction through learning-oriented mental models

Partly's mission is to reimagine how the world interacts with vehicle parts in smarter ways that build a more connected and lasting world. To achieve this, Partly offers three solutions: PartsPal; an auto parts inventory and fitment management tool, Partly Marketplace; the #1 way to buy and sell parts around the globe, and UVDB - the Universal Vehicle Database.

In the first episode of our latest season of Wild Hearts, Partly co-founder and CEO Levi Fawcett chats to host Mason Yates about his journey to finding the ‘right problem’, lessons learned from failed startups, and the importance of not hiring yourself.

Episode Highlights from Levi Fawcett

"Process is not bad. It's just overused a lot and we prefer to think of things as a framework. A process implies a step-by-step thing that you do and follow mindlessly, a framework just gives you a way of thinking about things and that's the important distinction."

"Understanding that mission, how much a team can do and it is possible from New Zealand, right? [At Rocket Lab], we were the second private company in the world to put something into space. There was SpaceX and then there was us... That certainly raises the bar in terms of understanding what's possible, and realizing we can absolutely compete with the Silicon Valleys of the world. "

"AllGoods was just this huge series of mistakes, not understanding what competition actually means, why you should avoid it, what a network effect is, why scaling demand on a marketplace is not valuable at all, how margins work, why taking a small chunk of a big margin makes a lot more sense etc."

"As we dug a little bit deeper, we realized there's nearly 2 trillion USD spent every year on these parts. Actually, this is not a local New Zealand problem. This is a global problem. A problem that was mostly unsolved for technical reasons as opposed to business reasons. When we applied all the things we'd learned at AllGoods around the business in terms of is this a defensible business with a large long-term moat? The answer was definitely yes."

"One of the most important things is don't hire yourself. As the company scales, you need more specialists."

Mason's Blinq