Dan Hockenmaier
Dan Hockenmaier is an expert on marketplace strategy and growth. He was previously the Director of Growth at Thumbtack as well as a partner at Reforge, where he co-created the monetization track. Currently, he is the Head of Strategy and Analytics at Faire.
Growth & Retention Skills
Building a growth model in a spreadsheet forces a team to reconcile conceptual theories with mathematical reality, leading to a much deeper understanding of how the business actually scales.
"And that's how I think about a growth model, so the analytical representation of how the business grows and it's typically built in a spreadsheet which has a really nice feature of being very hard to..."
Measuring retention effectively requires tracking both the initial activation rate and the long-term survival curve of user cohorts.
"Second would be retention. So at what rate are these customers activating? And then have some kind of basic monthly retention curve. So how long are they staying around? What's the survival rate in ea..."
Overlay: Marketplace Skills
Adding SaaS tools to a marketplace provides linear, predictable value that can stabilize and retain participants while the unpredictable marketplace ecosystem grows.
"If you're building a SaaS business, you're a construction worker, you're building the product and the features and selling it, and it's this very linear thing. For a marketplace, you're like messing w..."
Successful marketplace balancing requires modeling the non-linear relationship between supply acquisition and demand-side behavior.
"So now what we've talked about is mostly modeling like the demand side of a business. So now you'd also need to think about supply acquisition and retention and how these two sides interact. So as we..."
Marketplace health is determined by complex ecosystem interactions where small changes can lead to unpredictable, delayed ripple effects across the entire platform.
"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..."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
Quantitative growth models provide an objective framework for comparing the potential impact of different product initiatives during planning.
"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 opportunitie..."