Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier

One lesson I've 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 its 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 the, the main advice is, like, to tread lightly. When you're messing with the core incentives or mechanisms of a marketplace, be very careful, particularly if you've got something that's working, on playing with those variables.

(Instrumental music) 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 Hockenmyer. 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, basis1, 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 Hockenmyer. I'm excited to chat with my friend Jon Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, Jon.

Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here.

Jon, 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?

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 ah-ha 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.

Supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

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.