Dan Hockenmaier @danhockenmaier Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

10,145

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Growth, marketplaces, trying to separate signal from noise. Chief Strategy Officer @faire_wholesale . Partner @reforge .

Marin County, CA

https://t.co/GlDKaip5bT

Joined August 2014

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

One concept has helped me understand marketplaces more than any other. I just published an essay in which I explore transaction costs, and how they explain: 1. Which industries make a good fit for marketplaces 2. How marketplaces have evolved and where they will go next 3. What

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

The way that Jensen Huang runs Nvidia is wild: 40 direct reports, no 1:1s - Believes that the flattest org is the most empowering one, and that starts with the top layer - Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting - Does not give career advice - "None of my

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

My experience has repeatedly proven this Paul Graham quote to be true. Three implications: 1. Writing cultures tend to learn faster than those that use slides, dashboards, or other mediums. 2. They learn faster because they present denser information to readers, but even more

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

@petergyang Interview where he talked about his management style:

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On leadership | Jensen Huang and Joel Hellermark

On May 31, we hosted the Sana AI Summit at Stockholm’s Eric Ericsonhallen. 400 pioneering leaders, investors, and researchers gathered to reflect on the new ...

www.youtube.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

Short thread on something I wish I had understood much better 10 years ago: If you are ambitious, there are basically two games you can play at a startup Many people early in their careers (especially those from big tech, consulting, finance) play the wrong game, and lose both

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 months

The business school version of how Doordash gained market share so rapidly is through clever strategy: targeting the suburbs where others weren't operating, acquiring untapped supply. That is not wrong, but it is also not all (or even most) of the real story. The actual story

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

@mercerron 30 years in the making. He must be cooking up quite a disaster

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

So much of what is written about growth is noise. Here are ten of the concepts I find myself coming back to over and over again 👇

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 month

YC's motto, extended edition

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

The source of a lot of bad product decisions:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

“Follow your passion” is such a scam. But it’s not as catchy as “follow the thing you’re pretty good at and people need, and then work really hard at it for a long time, and then later realize you’ve built a passion for it"

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

“Creative intensity” is the rate at which products or services go stale and new ones must be created. It is the key factor in predicting the future of marketplaces. On the left, the marketplace model will ultimately go extinct. On the right, it will persist. A thread 🧵👇

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 years

The best saas pricing experts in the world have absolutely nothing on my local car wash

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

Most strategy books are a waste of time, but 7 Powers by @hamiltonhelmer gave me a genuinely new mental model for thinking about how to build a moat. Here is a brief summary of Helmer's concepts, and five common ways they are misunderstood by startups:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

To junior folks recruiting at startups: If you only have a few years of experience and they're willing to give you a Director or VP title, that is usually not a reason to get excited, but actually a clear signal not to take the job

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

18 days

One of the highest ROI things you can do: raise the aspirations of those around you

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

9 months

Peter Thiel on customer acquisition: “The kitchen sink approach doesn’t work. Most companies get zero distribution channels to work. If you get just one channel to work you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. Distribution follows

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

It seems likely that the winning formula is hybrid: 2-3 days a week in the office Fully in-person companies get out-recruited Fully remote companies get out-executed

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

Game 1: Optimize for company outcome. Spend all of your time finding and fixing the highest leverage problems you can Game 2: Optimize for career outcome. Seek external signals like title, scope, and team size. Make sure you're "learning the right things"

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

Don’t let a/b testing take the place of critical thinking. “Let’s just test it” is sometimes code for “I don’t want to do the hard work of talking to customers, analysis, synthesis”.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

👉 New essay on the Future of Marketplaces An exploration into why the marketplace model will ultimately go extinct in some industries but not others, and what this means for founders, operators, and investors in the next generation of marketplaces

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The future of marketplaces: coordination, capital, and creativity

Airbnb and Doordash ripped to a collective market cap well over $100B. They're also two more data points in a long trend toward marketplaces with higher commissions and that do more work to earn...

www.danhock.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

Say what you want about Tesla. But Elon is undoubtedly The Man in the Arena. And we need more men and women like him.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

As a result, the right move is to focus on putting yourself in the best companies with the best teams you can, and then playing Game 1

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

@JosephZaghrini 100%. Would not work in most contexts. However I do think the way they operate is part of why they’ve been able to attract the talent they have.

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 months

@the_wilderless Man’s Search for Meaning

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 years

Top 100 Long Reads on Marketplaces, Strategy, Growth, and More:

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Long Form Reads

Top essays on strategy, growth, marketplaces, and more

www.danhock.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

1. Startups are an iterated game. Earning a reputation for playing Game 1 opens doors 2. It's actually very hard to know what is good for your career. Being pulled by the intersection of what the company needs and what you're good at works better than any "20 year career plan"

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Dan Hockenmaier

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1 year

@gudmvatn Top comment so far

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

At the largest companies, it's more natural (and probably actually in your best interest) to play Game 2 This is close to the definition of why it is so awful to work at very large companies

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

This is why payback period is a better measure of customer acquisition efficiency than LTV/CAC LTV is blind to speed, but speed is half the battle

@patrick_oshag

Patrick OShaughnessy

4 years

Product gets all the attention I’m a sucker for clever financing or distribution strategies “[Pinduoduo] took advantage of down payments from suppliers and used stretched payment terms to create float out of customer transactions. It used that float to fund customer acquisition

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

The more your personal outcome and the company outcome are synonymous, the more obvious it is that Game 1 is the right choice Founders and people at startups with <10 people almost always play Game 1

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 months

The scarce resource in almost every company is synthesis. We are flooded with information: data, customer feedback, missing goals, beating goals, experiments that worked and didn't, competition emerging or changing tactics. The most impactful people in every function can parse

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Picking the right startup is far more important than picking your initial role within it. If I could only evaluate three metrics to assess a startup's long term prospects, here is what they would be (none of them are topline growth): User and revenue retention By far the most

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 years

At the end of the day, the only flywheel that matters. Whoever spins it the fastest wins.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 months

I'm excited to share that I'm stepping into a new role as the Chief Strategy Officer at @faire_wholesale I've worked with this team for seven (!) years - first as an advisor and then full time. It feels simultaneously as if we've come a long way and we're just getting started.

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

8 months

I believe you can't fully understand a business until you can articulate it as an equation. It forces you to identify the key outputs and where you have leverage to drive them. Lenny and I teamed up to create equations for the most common business models in tech 👇

@lennysan

Lenny Rachitsky

8 months

Every startup can be distilled into a simple equation. And until you can express yours as one, you don’t fully understand your business. Having this equation gives you a map for understanding your biggest growth drivers, your key inputs and output, and once your teams are

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

▶️ AI reading list I added a section on AI to Long Form Reads. Because of the pace of development, many of these were written in the last few months, and some in the last few days. Link below. I’m sure it is highly incomplete. What must be added? Huge thank you to the many

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

@provisionalidea I find that slides tend toward a choppier, bulleted form of writing that allows for more gaps in thinking Any time I've started with slides and then put into writing, I learn something in the process, but the inverse is not usually true

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

The quote is from this excellent essay:

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 months

We are entering the age of the IC. Individual contributors will be able to have >10x the impact they've had historically, and this will mean fewer total managers and layers at companies and many more people on senior IC career tracks for the long haul. Three big drivers of this

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

A recommendation, especially for new managers: Keep both of these books on your desk. They both have indexes in the back. When you come across a topic you’re struggling with (comp, hard feedback, hiring, firing) just see what they have to say. They will rarely have perfect

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

But at most startups, even those with hundreds or thousands of people, it's almost always the right choice to play Game 1. Doing so will result in a better outcome for the company, but also a better outcome your career, for two reasons:

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Easily two of the best books written on strategy in the last 20 years.

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

What so many people seem to get wrong about networking

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

How to get growth ideas: - Talk to customers - Unpack counterintuitive test results - Talk to customers - Articulate your growth model and where it's weak - Talk to customers - Tear down analogous companies - Talk to the PM who has great ideas... because she talks to customers

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

When marketplaces entered, why did the TAM for taxis expand massively, the TAM for lodging expand marginally, and the TAM for housing not expand at all? The answer is mostly transaction costs: the cost of coordinating and executing a purchase. The more you can reduce those costs

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

6 months

New contender for best definition of strategy: “Strategy is accepting that you are doing something better than the other and the other is doing something better than you. You have to pick your fight.” - Axel Dumas, CEO of Hermes (via latest @AcquiredFM pod on Hermes)

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 years

📚 Long Form Read of the Week: Market Share, by Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan If you flipped traditional competitive analysis and started only knowing market share, could you infer anything about power (ability to charge a markup over costs)? Short answer: yes 3 ideas:

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Dan Hockenmaier

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2 years

@patrick_oshag Net revenue retention

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

If I'm understanding the thought leadership correctly: All saas will ultimately become marketplaces All marketplaces will ultimately become fintechs All fintechs will ultimately become banks 🤔

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

1/ The Hierarchy of Engagement by @sarahtavel A framework for sustainable growth: (1) users completing the core action (2) accruing benefits and mounting losses to drive retention (3) virtuous loop by which user engagement fuels future growth.

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The Hierarchy of Engagement, expanded

A framework for building enduring products

sarahtavel.medium.com

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Definition of switching costs: It took itself until 2019 (!) to migrate off of Oracle databases, 13 years after AWS launched. via @AcquiredFM

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

"Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists." - Paul Graham in "How to Do Great Work"

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

A framework shared with me many years ago when navigating a career decision: do you want to build, sell, or understand? There are countless variations, but really only three fundamental paths, and figuring out how you want to spend your time is very useful. 🔨 Build:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

Junior folks recruiting at startups: after you've received an offer, if the company is not willing to go 100% open book on their metrics, do not take the job.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 months

I talk to so many people who are joining startups for the first time that want to do “high level strategy work”. This is a bad goal and they won’t get to do much of it even under the very best circumstances. There is just very little of that kind of work to go around for

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

@TheKamilFranek Hard to know today (once in a lifetime tailwind) But I think there is a good argument that if they didn't operate with this level of speed and nimbleness there are a few times in the early days that they would have died.

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

9 months

@blader Highly correlated: combatting cynicism and remaining earnest

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 month

New essay: 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐣𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 In an AMA with the @shreyas product community, someone asked: "When is the best time to join a startup to maximize your economic outcome?" My immediate reaction was to think about risk. Not a company's stage or how much money

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Three of the most value-dense pieces you can read on startup strategy, by @ganeumann : 💡 Schumpeter on Strategy - Argues that companies create excess profit through innovation, and continue to make this profit by protecting their innovation from being copied through moats. In a

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

New post on @firstround ! @lennysan and I were riffing on the most common customer acquisition mistake we see, and created a framework to help consumer founders and operators avoid it.

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Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups

In Dan Hockenmaier's and Lenny Rachitsky's experience, founders are often surprised to learn that there are very few routes to scalable new customer acquisition. Here, this duo unpacks the three ways...

review.firstround.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

@patrick_oshag 1-800-COLLECT was hugely popular in the 90s, and in response AT&T launched a competitor, 1-800-Operator However AT&T later discovered many people misspelled Operator with an 'er' at the end... and that 1-800-COLLECT had bought the misspelled number and was siphoning customers

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Why aren't there huge marketplaces in services like there are in products, despite massive TAM and highly fragmented buyers are sellers? I just published an essay on what is holding them back, how they might soon get unstuck, and why this would produce some of the largest

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

The same factors that make marketplaces hard to build often make them incredible businesses at scale. Riffing with @onecaseman @lennysan and @eriktorenberg inspired me to dust off some of my favorite learnings on how to build a marketplace 🧵

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

8 months

For anyone using the holidays to search for a new startup role: here is a ~2,000 word, ~5 min read on how I would approach it: There is a common failure mode in early startup careers: Step 1: Get your dream job. Doing product or growth or whatever it is that makes your heart

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

13 days

Ben Thompson on how to be prolific

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

@BrandonWaselnuk Half of my motivation for posting this was getting to use this photo

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

Listening to @Jason and @DavidSacks work through their differences just gave me some unexpected hope for the future of America

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E17: Big Tech bans Trump, ramifications for the First Amendment & the open Internet

Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: http

podcasts.apple.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

6 years

Incredibly interesting quote I heard recently from @tylercowen that’s going to require some processing: “I think if you've lived an optimal life, there is actually a lot of regret at the end of it. The best path for a life is not regret minimization... it's something else. (1/4)

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

I am so excited to announce that I will be joining the team at @faire_wholesale to lead analytics and strategy! Why didn't I join in 2017 when I first started advising and Faire had just raised their seed round? Good question 😬👇

@faire_wholesale

Faire

@faire_wholesale

3 years

We’re thrilled to share Faire has acquired strategy & analytics consulting firm, Basis One, founded by @danhockenmaier . Dan will join as Head of Analytics & Strategy, bringing along an incredible team to help scale Faire’s analytics and strategy function.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 months

Less content, consumed more deeply. Most of what you learn from a book, an essay, or a podcast is not from the information it gives you but from your attempt to make sense of it and use it to solve the questions you are personally trying to answer. You have to fit it into your

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

Key takeaway: if Max tries to recruit you to Faire, you might as well just join now because he will literally never give up

@MaxRhodesOK

Max Rhodes

3 years

I'm so excited to be welcoming Dan Hockenmaier and the Basis One team to Faire! It took us four years of recruiting, but well worth the wait.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

It's a big day at Faire as we announce our Series G at a 12.4B valuation. I continue to be blown away by how fast this team ships. We are just getting started, and we're hiring on every team.

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Wholesale Marketplace Faire Raises $400 Million

Faire’s latest funding round values the company at $12.4 billion and allows it to expand hiring, including in its finance function.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

8 months

Here is the very hard thing about talking to customers (at least for me): In the moment, it often feels low signal. You spend a lot of time talking to someone for just a few salient points, or perhaps it doesn't map well to anything you're focused on at all. It feels higher

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

7 months

In virtually every growth model I've ever seen, customer retention is the single most important input into improving both top and bottom line performance. But there is a major catch: In almost as many cases, it is also the single hardest metric to move. If you think about a

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

@IlirSela Marketplace minds hall of fame: @onecaseman @sarahtavel @lennysan @bgurley @simonrothman @andrewchen @ai @jeff_jordan @angelatytran @JamesCurrier @peteflint @mcgd @jbreinlinger @JuliaMorrongiel

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

➡️ New essay on The Unbundling Fallacy In which I argue that the expectation of mass unbundling of platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn was largely a zero interest rate phenomenon. And how to predict the few that will break out and become category-defining businesses Link below

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

It signals that they have weak organizational discipline. And org debt can bite just as hard as tech debt.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 years

📚 Long Form Read of the Week: How to Lose a Monopoly, by Benedict Evans If written today, it could have been titled "Alphabet, AI, and Antitrust" The central metaphor remains a highly relevant one:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

2/ Growth Loops are the New Funnels by @bbalfour @onecaseman @kevinakwok @andrewchen The fastest growing products are driven by one or more compounding systems where inputs generate outputs that can be re-invested in the input.

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Growth Loops: Transcending AARRR Frameworks — Reforge

Growth funnels were a good starting point but it is time to move past that outdated framework & focus on building growth loops.

www.reforge.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

An incredible amount of bad startup decisions could be avoided by remembering Gall's Law

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

Improving onboarding is the highest leverage way to improve customer retention. One reason it is overlooked: most people on the team simply don't remember what it was like to be a new user of their product - they have spent too much time with it

@scottbelsky

scott belsky

4 years

pretty convinced: the first mile of your product's user experience will determine how it will end. 💀

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Great read on why strategy matters, even for startups. It draws on probably the best two books on strategy written in the last two decades: - 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer - Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

@packyM

Packy McCormick

1 year

Last week, I wrote about moats. This week, I defend strategy.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

3/ Product Channel Fit by @bbalfour Distribution follows a power law: most products get >70% of growth from a single channel: virality, paid marketing, sales, or content/SEO. To win, a product must be built to be highly competitive in a given channel.

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Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy

Earlier, I discussed our common obsession with Product Market Fit that has led to false beliefs such as “Product Market Fit is the only thing that matters.” A byproduct of that false belief are...

brianbalfour.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

"Perhaps modern time travel is our ability to take a loan out from our future success to ensure we achieve it." Finally got to new @kevinakwok essay and it is worth your time:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

The most common mistake marketplaces make when choosing new markets to enter: focusing too much on TAM. You need some minimum viable TAM to justify the investment, but it's just not that important. This is because (1) most potential markets are quite large and (2) even if they

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 months

There is a part of the food delivery market story that is mostly about getting the strategy right, which is the shift from the old guard like Grubhub that did not offer delivery to the new guard of heavily managed marketplaces like Doordash and Postmates, and all that this

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

9 months

There is a "hierarchy of needs" when choosing a startup: start at the bottom and move up when a condition is met. Many people apply these in reverse, optimizing for comp and title and then wasting years at a company that goes nowhere. More on each step:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

3 years

One of the things you learn working on businesses that serve SMBs: because of the high turnover rate, you can build a big business quickly without convincing anyone to switch. You just have to be the way new SMBs do business. This has never been more true than it is today:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

7/ Why Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy by @onecaseman Retention is the most important metric in your growth model. Onboarding (getting users to stick) is often the most effective way to work on retention.

Why Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy

Onboarding is often the weakest component of a company's growth strategy and also one of the hardest to solve. I talk about how to think about onboarding and some best practices I've learned along the

caseyaccidental.com

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

5/ Increase Funnel Conversion with Psych by @dariusmc Conversion rate optimization is not necessarily about reducing friction, it is about managing a user's psychology.

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Increase funnel conversion with Psych

Have you ever wondered why people are bouncing from your nearly-frictionless onboarding flow? Why the same change can result in a lift on…

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 month

Perhaps the strongest signal that someone will be successful at a startup: they minimize the amount of energy spent worrying about who gets credit or what is fair, and plow it into just doing the work.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

Excellent posts from @lennysan and @onecaseman with benchmarks on the most important part of your growth model: retention. One addition to this is the increasingly common scenario where low user retention can actually be a good thing 👇

@onecaseman

Casey Winters

4 years

New blog post: What Is Good Retention: An Exhaustive Benchmark Study with Lenny Rachitsky

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

5 years

10/ The Most Powerful Growth Hack Of 2019 Isn’t Sexy @KateBour The best growth teams use both quantitative and qualitative signals to guide decision making. For many, incorporating customer research is an untapped and potent weapon.

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The Most Powerful Growth Hack Of 2019 “Isn’t Sexy”

Every marketer or product manager worth their salt is looking for ways to do more with less.

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

About as good of a one-line description of strategy as you can get: "Strategy is making trade-offs, and aligning those trade-offs so that they are a force multiplier rather than in conflict with each other." - @gilbert on the Benchmark dinner episode of @AcquiredFM

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

4 years

most of twitter

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

8 months

Summary of 2-hour Huberman pod on how to prevent and treat colds and flus: - people are contagious for longer than you think - wash your hands and don't touch your face. Viruses mostly enter though your eyes - moderate exercise (<60 min) boosts immune system, tons of exercise

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Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

2 years

📚 Long Form Read of the Week: Food Delivery Wars by Sarah Tavel Doordash and Uber Eats ate GrubHub's lunch. Three takeaways from this battle:

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

How to actually calculate payback periods for a marketplace (without deluding yourself): A good payback period for marketplaces serving consumers is 6-12 months. Early stage marketplaces virtually always have to operate way above that, because they don't have the liquidity to

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@danhockenmaier

Dan Hockenmaier

@danhockenmaier

1 year

Network effects are not created equally. Two dimensions that are highly predictive of the power of network effects in generating long term defensibility for marketplaces: X-axis: How much supply does it take before the benefit to buyers begins to asymptote? Is supply relatively

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