Dan Hockenmaier
Chief Strategy Officer, Faire. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorfounderauthor@danhockenmaier ↗LinkedIn ↗danhock.com ↗
Dan Hockenmaier served as Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Strategy & Analytics at wholesale marketplace Faire, which acquired his growth strategy firm Basis One. He previously led growth marketing at Thumbtack, co-created Reforge's monetization track, and writes frameworks in his newsletter, Dan Hock’s Essays.
Everything Dan Hockenmaier said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hockenmaier: Payback period is a far better metric than LTV:CAC
“Thinking about something like payback period is a much better measure of paid marketing performance than LTV to CAC because the speed at which you get enough money back to then go acquire another customer has much more bearing on how fast your business can gro…”
Hockenmaier: Aggregating demand determines the winning marketplace
“I think ultimately demand is the only thing that matters. If you are successful at aggregating the demand in your industry, you will have the winning marketplace.”
Hockenmaier: Marketplace expansion requires keeping GTM in lockstep with product readiness
“It's who can deliver an Incredible end-to-end customer experience first, even if for a smaller number of customers, because that's what creates the flame where actually like customers are really loving it, retain talking about it, and you can then expand from …”
Hockenmaier: The thesis of unbundling horizontal platforms is overhyped and rarely succeeds
“Broadly though, I think that we overhyped the idea of unbundling. So I think every six months I've seen articles, somebody wrote, this is the unbundling of Reddit, the unbundling of LinkedIn, the unbundling of Facebook. We're going to take All those blue links…”
Hockenmaier: Autonomous vehicles will end the ride-sharing marketplace model
“As soon as autonomous vehicles arrive, we're gonna fully consolidate that industry. And it's not gonna be marketplace model anymore.”
Hockenmaier: Early big tech growth playbooks mislead startups without product-market fit
“I actually think like the legacy of that growth team, and then like Twitter and LinkedIn and the others that followed is actually maybe problematic when we think about some of the applications of growth later on, because they were applied in this case of like …”
Hockenmaier: High-effect experimentation yields faster learnings than pure testing velocity
“I also think, like, one of the mistakes that companies make a lot is this idea that speed of testing or velocity of testing is the most important thing. It is important to move fast because it is quite hard to have good hypotheses about what's going to work. L…”
Hockenmaier: Later marketplace cohorts often see lower CAC and higher LTV
“So typically, as you acquire more and more customers, you're acquiring the marginally good fit customer over time. And your CACs go up, your LTVs go down, it gets harder and harder. Marketplace actually the inverse, like the supply of liquidity is improving, t…”
Hockenmaier: Dual-sided ROI equations allow marketplaces to ignore balance ratios
“Actually the thing that matters is can you write an ROI equation for acquiring supply and demand, which fully internalizes the marketplace dynamic. And so what I mean by this is like, if you're acquiring a new customer, you need to Include the CAC of acquiring…”
Hockenmaier: Marketplace expansion should prioritize adjacency over TAM size
“Beyond a certain point, TAM or the size of the market actually matters very little because these are all big enough that they would dramatically inflect the curve of the business. If you make them work, it's much more relevant to focus on a couple of things. O…”
Hockenmaier: Expanding a marketplace to SaaS is easier than the reverse
“So broadly, I will say, I think it's easier for a marketplace to go SaaS than it is the other direction.”
Hockenmaier: Horizontal platforms beat vertical rivals on SEM via higher LTV
“And so our customer LTV was always higher and we would always win when we were bidding against those other customers on SEM keywords that were relevant to that category. So it's like, it becomes very hard to compete if you're picking off this kind of like narr…”
Hockenmaier: Concentrated sides break marketplaces because they hold too much leverage
“The reason we won't see a huge explosion in this area is that B to B also comes with something else, which is much lower fragmentation in many cases. And you need fragmentation for a good marketplace. Like the more concentrated either side of your market is, t…”
Hockenmaier: Opendoor is an e-commerce business, not a marketplace
“People talk about open door as a marketplace. But it's not, it's an e-commerce website, which has the highest price points you can imagine because you're buying houses, right? But there's no like supplier on the other side. They've already bought the house. So…”
Hockenmaier: Startups should adopt third-party experimentation tools rather than building internally
“I think increasingly the third party tools to do this The full stack tools are pretty good, actually. And so even for quite talented teams, the answer is usually not to build it yourself right away. You know, I'd love to hear if you have a rule of thumb on thi…”
Hockenmaier: Startups should keep growth in-house to preserve rich customer feedback
“For almost all things related to growth, paid marketing not only do you want to build that muscle yourself, but it's like the front line. You're dealing with your customers and the feedback is so rich that if that person is not sitting next to somebody else on…”
Hockenmaier: Half the value of a growth model is simply building it
“And it's typically built in a spreadsheet, which has a really nice feature of being very hard to fake. Like you can talk about a business conceptually. But when you actually have to get it to line up and link in a model, it's very hard to not force yourself to…”
Hockenmaier: Growth models are for opportunity assessment, not financial forecasting
“I think importantly, it is not a forecasting tool. So it's not gonna replace what your finance team is building to project the business. In fact, Often the output can be highly variable because you're playing with lots of these assumptions, but it is a great t…”
Hockenmaier: Marketplace growth models easily fail from stacked supply-demand assumptions
“As soon as you start stacking assumptions, you're highly sensitive to how many assumptions do you have to make? And do you know how to make that assumption? And marketplaces kind of create complexity on both of those, because for the first piece, you're modeli…”
Hockenmaier: Use basic company models paired with team-level mini growth models
“The thing that I have gravitated to more as I've done more of this is like one very basic high level conceptual model. So that's like the building blocks you talked about, which as simply as possible describes how the whole system works. And so you start to ge…”
Hockenmaier: Team growth models split into funnel management versus tension management
“I think there's probably like two core archetypes for this. So if you have something that's more like a growth team, it's a little bit simpler. They're typically managing some kind of funnel and they can understand, do I want to work on driving more traffic, m…”
Hockenmaier: Adding low-quality supply boosts short-term GMV but harms retention
“So if I let on a bunch of new supply to a marketplace, probably the first thing that happens is our GMV or our revenue goes up because we have all these new suppliers, which can transact with demand. But if those are on average lower quality, it's going to deg…”
Hockenmaier: Growth is far more sensitive to retention than people intuit
“One of the immediate things that you see when you build these is that you're Growth is much more sensitive to customer retention than you can ever intuit. Because there's a lot of interaction between having a healthy retained customer base and everything you c…”
Hockenmaier: Growth models establish a common currency for resource allocation
“The most difficult thing about making that kind of effort Is developing a common currency by which you can trade off their efforts. So like this team is saying they can move this metric by X and this team is moving this metric by Y. I have no way to make those…”
The other half of the tape: Dan Hockenmaier's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 3
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Lenny's Podcast 3
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Strategy Officer, Faire | 1 | 36 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Chief Strategy Officer, Faire | 1 | 18 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |