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Hockenmaier: Monetization experiments require long-term five percent holdout groups

Dan Hockenmaier · Advice on Organizing and Running Growth Teams from Dan Hockenmaier and Gustaf Alströmer · Y Combinator · Jun 26, 2019 · at 34:08

Dan Hockenmaier (founder of Basis One) outlines best practices for measuring long-term user behavior changes during pricing experiments.

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“Price and anything related to monetization is really tough, because it's basically a system of incentives, and it will change people's behavior. And so you have to observe these things over very long periods of time to make sure you're getting the right answer. And so I'm like a big fan of running A-B test for a sufficient amount of time and then flipping it to, you know, maybe five percent remaining in, in the original test for a very long term to observe the thing that you thought happened continues to happen and validating that.”

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