Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier (Faire, Thumbtack, Reforge)

**Dan Hockenmaier** (0:00)
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. You have to have a very light touch. Like if you're building a SaaS business, you're a construction worker. You're like building the product and the features and selling it, and it's this very linear thing. For a marketplace, you're like messing with this ecosystem that you don't actually really understand how it works. And sometimes you might do something over here which drives this long-term effect two months later, and then you're gonna be pulling your hair out two months later trying to figure out what you did over here that made that thing happen. And so I think that the main advice is to tread lightly. When you're messing with the core incentives or mechanisms of the marketplace, be very careful, particularly if you've got something that's working, on playing with those variables.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Dan Hockenmaier. I venture to say that Dan has worked on more marketplace startups than anyone else in the world, including helping scale Thumbtack in the early days, currently working at Faire, where he's head of strategy and analytics, and through his consulting business, Faceless One, where he's helped dozens of startups figure out their growth models and growth strategies.
Dan hasn't shared a ton of his insights and experiences publicly, so I was really excited to chat with him and to dig into all the things that go into building a marketplace business, along with coming up with your growth model. This episode gets very deep into the weeds, and so if you're working on growth strategy or you're building a marketplace business, this episode is for you. And so with that, I bring you Dan Hockenmaier.
I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey John.

**John Cutler** (1:49)
Hey Lenny, excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:50)
John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics.
But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?

**John Cutler** (2:02)
Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments and learn. That's the heart of growth to us.
So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations. Experiment and CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:23)
Supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

**John Cutler** (2:27)
Yeah. So Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:36)
Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com to get started.
Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (2:51)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:52)
And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (2:55)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chopped full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:15)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (3:29)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:45)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
Dan Hockenmaier, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here.
It's great to have you here. So we are actual real-life friends, and we've collaborated on a number of writing projects, including the Race Car Growth Framework and a whole thing on Consumer Growth Strategy. But there's a couple topics that we've never actually dug deep into and that you haven't written about. And so I'm really excited to dig into two specific things in our chat today. One is growth models, and two is just Marketplace Growth Strategy and all the things around Marketplace Growth. But before we get into all that, could you just give us like a 55 second background on all of the wonderful things that you've done in your career?