The Ledger
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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: 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: 90% of growth advising is talking founders out of ideas
“Nine times out of 10, we are talking them out of doing things that they want to do.”
Hockenmaier: Startups should not scale acquisition before cohort retention curves flatten
“You don't have to have best in class retention numbers, but you need to be seeing some cohorts of people for which retention truly levels out and they use the product very longterm. And if you don't see that you're not ready.”
Hockenmaier: A 5% activation boost usually beats a 20% acquisition lift
“What happens if our activation rate goes up by five percent? Usually that's really powerful, much more powerful than a 20% increase in acquisition.”
Hockenmaier: Scaling to $100M revenue typically requires one dominant channel
“To get to a hundred million in revenue, typically, 70, 80% of all new customer acquisition is coming from one channel.”
Hockenmaier: Improving retention requires early proxy metrics in week one
“If you are working on retention or trying to optimize retention metric,
Very often the way to do that is actually quite early in the product experience. The types of ways that you set a user up for good retention, and it could be the first session, first week…”
Hockenmaier: Marketplace North Star metrics must measure both sides
“In general for marketplaces, you know, the kind of North Star or the top metric is not something like weakly active users because you need something that combines both sides of the marketplace. So in our case, it was transactions or requests placed.”
Hockenmaier: Thumbtack defined market liquidity by the percentage of requests reaching quote thresholds
“The main thing was when a consumer got a certain number of quotes from a pro we had, they then believed that we did the job for them. We gave them options. They could go choose their hire rate was much higher there. Their NPS would actually, like, you could wa…”
Hockenmaier: More startup product decisions are reversible than founders realize
“One of the things that has, I've learned working with more and more companies is that more types of decisions are type two decisions than you think, the type of decision you can actually roll back and get another shot at. It's maybe, you know, I, we don't work…”
Hockenmaier: Monetization experiments require long-term five percent holdout groups
“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…”
Hockenmaier: Paid marketing degrades quickly if used as a primary growth strategy
“If it becomes your primary channel, it's a very hard thing to sustain because it's expensive but also because it degrades pretty quickly, actually. So, like, you know, if you look at the DTC companies or Blue Apron, I think, you know, they grew really quickly …”
Hockenmaier: The best companies at monetizing win in paid marketing
“These are all, like we were talking earlier, business model competitions where like the best companies at monetizing are going to win in paid marketing. And so if your product is better at monetizing, it allows you to then go do, do more of that.”
Hockenmaier: Referral programs are paid marketing, not free virality
“Referrals are potentially more like paid marketing than they are like virality in some ways. And so thinking about it in that way and payback and the other things is really important. And so when we talk about the growth of referrals, we're talking about anoth…”
Hockenmaier: Growth tactics can be weaponized for beneficial apps like health and fitness
“We're like, we're not going back to a world where we don't have these addictive products competing for our attention, but we can weaponize these same tools we have learned for good things. And so like other products are going to come in, you know, you see this…”
Hockenmaier: Early SurveyMonkey growth team gained influence via post-survey page tests
“The early team at SurveyMonkey did a great job of this. Like there's like one page in the product, which is the end of the flow. When you take a survey, you have like millions of people hitting this page that could ultimately some, at some point become survey …”