Tom Gillespie

About

Twelve years in product management across three continents. I've been VP Product or CPO at four marketplaces — two in the APAC region, two US-based — and have navigated the specific product challenges that make two-sided platforms so hard: liquidity bootstrapping, pricing algorithm design, trust and safety architecture, and the supply-demand balance problem that kills marketplaces before they find product-market fit. I work with 2–3 companies at a time.

Experience highlights

At Airtasker (Australia's largest services marketplace, ASX listed), I was VP Product through their ASX IPO and the subsequent international expansion to the UK. The IPO process required building the product analytics and data governance infrastructure that public company reporting demands — a 6-month project that ran parallel to our normal feature development cycle.

At Freelancer.com (the world's largest freelancing marketplace by registered users), I led the product team responsible for the trust and safety infrastructure. The core challenge was reducing fraud rates without reducing conversion rates — a genuine product optimisation problem with a real revenue cost to every decision. We reduced fraudulent project creation by 62% while increasing GMV conversion by 8%.

My fractional CPO engagements focus exclusively on marketplace and platform businesses. The skill set is specific: liquidity economics, two-sided pricing, trust infrastructure, and the supply/demand balance problem. Most marketplace founders have read the theory. Few have actually built the specific product systems that solve liquidity at the city or category level. That's my edge.

Expertise

Past companies

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