Dan Hockenmaier is the Chief Strategy Officer at Faire. — Faire's New Chief Strategy Officer, Faire Newsroom.
On Growth Strategy & Modeling
- The purpose of a growth model: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think 50% of the value you get from it is simply building the model. It forces you to understand it and then you get this artifact which you can use to understand how to weigh different opportunities or understand the benefit of working on different things." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Growth models are not forecasting tools: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think importantly it is not a forecasting tool, so it's not going to replace what your finance team is building to project the business." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The surprising sensitivity of retention: Dan Hockenmaier: "One of the immediate things that you see when you build these is that your 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 else you care about." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The power of focusing on the early user experience: "Very often I think the biggest wins in retention come from inflecting the early user experience." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- Retention is a core product issue: Dan Hockenmaier: "Retention is a tough measure to work on because it is the culmination of the entire product experience." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Templates cannot replace the work: Dan Hockenmaier: "One thing I'll say is going back to 50% of the value being figuring it out, that actually negates the value of templates in some way." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Start with a smart analyst or finance partner: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think one tactical piece of advice, I think the best way to start this is to find a smart analyst or smart finance person often is the right type of person to partner with and just start building it." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Focus on new users before resurrection: Dan Hockenmaier: "It's usually much higher leverage to focus on new users and, as a result, typically you want to wait to spin up resurrection efforts until you've exhausted some of these earlier funnel efforts." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The most common analytical failure mode: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think one of the most common analytical failure modes is this pattern, which is our best users do X, so why can't we make other users do that same thing and then drive future attention." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Your best users are not a recipe: Dan Hockenmaier: "It almost never works that way because there's something unique about that customer and their experience which is driving it." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Payback period over LTV:CAC: Linking contribution margin to reinvestment in paid marketing "makes it really clear why thinking about something like payback period is a much better measure of paid marketing performance than LTV to CAC." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- Build, sell or understand: Dan Hockenmaier: "Most of engineering and operations is about building the product or the company. And most of analytics and research is about better understanding what to do." — Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays.
On Marketplaces
- The gardener versus the construction worker: Dan Hockenmaier: "One lesson I learned the hard way a bunch of times on this is that if you think about running a marketplace, you're basically like a gardener." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The primacy of demand: "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." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- Why people over-rotate on supply: Dan Hockenmaier: "I do think though that on average when you hear advice about where to focus, people over rotate on supply and actually are under focused on demand." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The purpose of acquiring supply: "You only should acquire supply to the extent you understand how it impacts demand." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- The bare case for managed marketplaces: Dan Hockenmaier: "Ultimately, you're charging a hundred percent commission and you're not a marketplace anymore." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The bull case for managed marketplaces: Dan Hockenmaier: "They took over logistics and, as a result, DoorDash did a much better job than the previous model of Seamless of being able to bring on a lot more restaurants and make it much more reliable for the customer." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Marketplaces are hard to start and hard to stop: Dan Hockenmaier: "They're very hard to get started, super capital intensive to get started, but once they're rolling, they're very hard to stop." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The complexity of marketplace questions: In a marketplace, "everything is just harder every question is more complex." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- Most of a marketplace is just a business: Dan Hockenmaier: "Most of what we're talking about is then nuance on top of that that makes the business unique." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Liquidity makes the service better: Dan Hockenmaier: "As you add more supply, the average wait time for a customer goes down and there's some magic moment around four or five minutes where it really clicks and is now just a much better service than calling a traditional taxi or something else." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The importance of share of wallet: Dan Hockenmaier: "Maybe it's a pseudo business that's effectively a consumer, but you can almost always measure some form of share of wallet on the supply side of a marketplace no matter what." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The logical error in the unbundling thesis: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think the core logical error in the argument for unbundling is that they over focus on one type of improvement, which is user experience and they under focus on the things that make scale businesses have better economics." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Adding software makes the product stickier: Dan Hockenmaier: "In the process, you're often making their lives easier, but you're also making your product much stickier." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
On Product & Analytics
- The value is in the building process: Dan Hockenmaier: "It forces you to understand it and then you get this artifact which you can use to understand how to weigh different opportunities or understand the benefit of working on different things." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Look for variability in the user experience: "One really valuable lens is to look for variability in that experience. So for the first week or month which customers are having a bad experience but shouldn't be." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- The trap of general-purpose products: "The internet killed general-purpose products. AI will bring them back." [6]
- Source: Dan Hock's Essays, Substack [6]
- AI is moving up the stack of front-line work: Dan Hockenmaier: "AI tools are beginning to do a lot of front-line CX and marketing work, and it will move up the stack from there." — Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays.
- Product matters when expanding: Dan Hockenmaier: "There's one other lesson here which I've learned a few times, which is that product is the thing that matters when expanding." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Retention reflects the whole experience: Dan Hockenmaier: "Whether people come back or not has to do with everything that they experienced along the way." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Decisions have delayed effects: Dan Hockenmaier: "Sometimes you might do something over here which drives this long-term effect two months later and then you're going to be pulling your hair out two months later trying to figure out what you did over here that made that thing happen." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Start simple and iterate: Dan Hockenmaier: "You need to start building in more variables but I would start there and start iterating on the model." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- From funnel to loop: Dan Hockenmaier: "Your existing customers are referring new customers and those go on to refer new customers." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Start linear: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think you can start pretty linear like acquiring customers, they're activating, retaining and generating contribution margin typically would be the output." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
On Career & Mindset
- The CEO's clarifying question: "Do you want to build, or do you want to sell?" [8]
- Source: Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays [8]
- Find joy in your fundamental role: "Ask yourself where you derive joy (and what you can put up with)." [8]
- Source: Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays [8]
- The inevitability of selling: "The job of selling comes for most of us eventually. Recruiting, managing, and working cross-functionally are all mostly about selling." [8]
- Source: Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays [8]
- Mid-career frustration for builders: "One of the most common sources of mid-career frustration is when builders or understanders realize that they are being asked to get into sales." [8]
- Source: Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays [8]
- Strategy as the 'understand' function: "Today I find myself in a job which is neither of those two: I lead the Strategy & Analytics teams at Faire, whose primary job is to understand." [8]
- Source: Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays [8]
- The power of writing to clarify understanding: Dan Hockenmaier: "But if you’re writing a strategy doc or an essay or your senior thesis, the point is that you have to do the writing yourself to figure out what you’re trying to say." — How to Use AI Without Losing Your Mind, Dan Hock's Essays.
- Ignore the noise when it is too early: Dan Hockenmaier: "The most important thing is simply being intentional about where you sit and being willing to ignore the noise if it’s too early." — How to Use AI Without Losing Your Mind, Dan Hock's Essays.
- Building a strategy consulting firm: Dan Hockenmaier: "From there I built a strategy consulting firm where we worked with a bunch of the top gross stage marketplaces on a range of topics, and ultimately that firm was acquired by Faire where I am today." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- Optimize for customer lifetime value: Dan Hockenmaier: "Probably what you're solving for is customer LTV and you can get that in multiple places." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- On the value of his early consulting career: "I don't think I learned much about how to actually run a business at those places but I did learn a lot about how to think about them." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- The real education begins at startups: "I think my real education on this began at Thumbtack." [1]
- Source: Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube [1]
- Growth as a hybrid role: "The role I landed on after that conversation was in growth, which is a mix of building and selling." [8]
- Source: Build, Sell, Understand, Dan Hock's Essays [8]
- AI will remove product trade-offs: Dan Hockenmaier: "There will no longer be trade-offs between things like convenience and quality or between personalization and production value." — The internet killed general-purpose products. AI will bring them back., Dan Hock's Essays.
- The role of a strategist: Dan Hockenmaier: "If I apply it to the current work that I'm doing, the strategy analytics team at Faire does a bunch of work to help our other teams make better decisions." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
- The fun of working on marketplaces: Dan Hockenmaier: "I think this is probably the most fun I've ever had in my career. It's just the incredible mix of the team. The business is really strong and I love the customers we're serving." — Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier, YouTube.
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