Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | 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 you have to have a very light touch like if you're building a SAS 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 too much 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 in the marketplace be very careful particularly if you've got something that's working on playing with those variables

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 hockenmeyer 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 Fair where he's head of strategy and analytics and through his Consulting business basis 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 hockenmeyer I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor amplitude hey John hey Lenny excited to be here 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 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 experimented cdb came out of listening to and observing our customers supporting growth and learning

has always been amplitude's core Focus right yeah so and it 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 growing absolutely agree thanks for joining us John and head to amplitude.com to get started hey Ashley head of marketing and flat file how many B2B SAS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers at least 40 percent and how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do well brainstorm 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 chock full of unexpected data and formatting they'll leave I am zero percent 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 totally it's incredible to see how our customers like Square Spotify and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of flat file it's because Flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster if you'd like to learn more or get started check out flat file at flatfile.com Lenny Dan hockenmeyer welcome to the podcast it's great to be here it's great to have

you here so we are actual relay 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 things are at Marketplace growth but before we get into all that if you just give us like a 55 second background on all of the wonderful things that you've done in your career yeah absolutely so I I feel very fortunate to have been able to work on a bunch of consumer Marketplace businesses for a long time I started in Consulting at BCG and then in private Equity I don't think I learned much about how to actually run a business at those places but I didn't learn a lot about how to think about

them I I think my real education on this began at Thumbtack so I joined when there were about 30 people and we just had to figure it out I was there for a little over three years and and meet more than 10 acts of business in that time from there I built a strategy consulting firm where we work with a bunch of the top gross stage marketplaces on a range of topics and ultimately that firm was acquired by Fair where I where I am today so I lead the strategy analytics team at fair I think this is probably the most fun I've ever had in my career it's like just incredible mix of the team the business is really strong and I just I love the customers we're serving so it's a Marketplace connecting local retailers and independent Brands and I just think that's a really fun group of customers to build for awesome and we're going to chat a bit about the stuff that you do there in marketplaces but before we get

into marketplaces I wanted to start with our first topic which is around growth models so people may have heard this term because general idea just to set the stage can you just describe what is a growth model and why is it useful to think about your business through the lens of a growth model yeah so I think it's useful in many contexts like if I apply apply to the the current work that I'm doing the strategy analytics team Affair does a bunch of work to help our other teams make better decisions so we're typically diving really deep into a bunch of topics across the business I think it's really easy to make that work kind of go off the rails or go too deep unless you have a conceptual understanding of how the whole business that it comes together and that's how I think about a growth model so the analytical representation of how the business grows and is typically built in a spreadsheet which has a really nice

feature of being very hard to fake like you can talk about a business conceptually but when you actually have to get it to line up and Link in model it's very hard to not force yourself to understand how a business works and so I think it's very valuable for that I think 50 of the value you get from it is simply building the model right like 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 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 in fact often the output can be highly variable because you're playing with lots of these assumptions but it is a great tool for kind of opportunity assessment for the business awesome so maybe a simple way to think about it just summarizing

is it's essentially a formula for your business that often lives in Excel that kind of summarizes and puts together all the things that kill can drive your business is that a simple way that's exactly right sweet so we're going to go

through examples of these growth models and how you've thought about this and actual potential formulas for companies but first just broadly like how would someone approach figuring this out for themselves how would you build a growth model for your own business yeah so if you think about some of the basic building blocks and probably the simplest use case would be like a SAS business there's a really kind of three components that you need to build for that one is to understand your acquisition channels are you looking at paid marketing or sales or viral kind of customer referrals and for each of those you have some different assumptions around traffic or spend or conversion rate those kind of things so that's kind of a perception 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 of each of these in those kind of Stack over time and then you have monetization so in the simplest example they may be paying you some monthly or annual fee and so that translates upon the stage so actually like if you're modeling a relatively simple SAS business those are the only core building blocks you need and you can you add a lot more complexity on it based on your kind of individual business that you're built up if you then are trying to build this for more of a transactional business you need to layer on the way that your current kind of retained customers start to transact so how many transactions per month what's the aod and then you're also going to typically need to build a need in economics because those businesses often have higher costs and so you're going to be thinking about cogs running major costs that you build into it and then one click beyond that would be to

build this for a Marketplace business 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 add Supply what's going to happen to to demand but those are the basic pieces I think you can start pretty linear like requiring customers they're activating retaining and generating contribution margin they typically the output but where it gets really interesting is we start making it non-linear so your the most basic example this would be virality your existing customers are referring new customers and those go on to refer new customers and based on that coefficient it has a lot to do with how fast your business grows and similarly with paid marketing as you generate contribution margin you can reinvest that and grow the next if you link those two up explicitly it makes it really

clear why thinking about something like payback period is a much better measure of paid marketing performance than LTV to CAC because the speed at which you get enough money back to the then go acquire another customer has much more bearing on how fast your business can grow than just the raw kind of bell to be the cap so this is where it gets really interesting where you get some variables to play with Okay so let's unpack a bit of the stuff you just talked about there's like a Whole Decade of knowledge that you just I think collapsed into a couple minutes so just to spend a little more time there so the core three kind of variables to a SAS business if you're thinking about the growth model of a SAS business for example you said acquisition channels like where's traffic coming from and that's essentially like how much traffic are you getting how is it converting and things like that and then there's

retention and then there's monetization and multiplying all that together you end up with here's how much revenue you're making as a business is that roughly how to think about it yeah it's rough right and those three building blocks are true for your most businesses most of what we're talking about is then like Nuance on top of that it makes the business unique cool so if someone was

just like starting the spreadsheet for their SAS business and we'll talk about even more examples but if someone is like here I'm going to try to figure out my growth model it's like let's create a a row for acquisition channels and traffic you're getting then a row for roughly your retention rate and then how much you're making per customer like a very high level is that how to think about this yeah exactly okay sweet and then marketplaces I think you said that it's transaction over time and average order values it's like how many people are buying stuff how much are they paying each time and then unit economics per transaction how much they're making profit per yeah exactly and the critical distinction there is like for SAS business your marginal costs are often very low and so it's not an important part to model but for transactional business you took that very high cogs or something else that you need to model

something right because you're just taking a cut you're not selling software

and then the acquisition channels retention monetization like Marketplace have those three things just broadly and then plus these additional two elements yeah I think one warning I would give so I built these for many businesses built them a thumbtack and fair many of the companies I work with at my consulting firm they break down a few places as soon as you start stacking assumptions you're highly sensitive to how many subjects you have to make and do you know how to make that assumption and Marketplace is kind of uh create complexity on both of those because for the first piece you're modeling both sides of business there's a lot of assumptions and second there's a few pieces which are very hard to understand how they were so the interaction between supply and demand is a big one like take Amazon as a sample there's a category manager at Amazon who's running their Pet's business and he decides that he

wants to go add a bunch more pet supply to the business who's going to go find pet food brands pet toy brands those businesses will generate a bunch of Revenue on the Amazon Marketplace but how much of that was actually incremental maybe there's a bunch of existing Pet Supply that customers would have bought anyway and does having a bunch more Supply create a happier customer who retains longer and drives those courts up these things are very hard to side something we've spent a lot of time thinking about at Bears Marketplace businesses and so if you're not careful you can have a junk in junk out problem with marketplaces and so the thing that I have gravitated to more as I've done more of this is like one very basic high level conceptual mob so that's like the building blocks you talked about which as simply as possible describes how the whole system works and so you start to get a feel for which

levers are important and then for each area of the business so each product pod each go to market team they should have their own kind of Mini model which describes the piece of the business they're working on so that team typically has a North star are and they should know what are all the inputs that drive that and a little model to articulate how that works and you'll never kind of stitch this up into one master thing I think that's a very difficult task but you have the Dual benefit of understanding the business Works broadly and then understanding if you zoom in on this piece what are the really the levers that need to be pulling to move my metric to make that last point a little more concrete what's an example of that what's a team that would have their own little model and imagine every team has their own understanding of yeah whatever works but yeah what's an example I think there's

probably like two core archetypes for this so if you have something that's more like a grow team it's a little bit simpler they're typically managing some kind of funnel and they can understand do I want to work on driving more traffic more conversion more retention and typically that's like a somewhat linear relationship but then you have all these teams that are really managing some tension in the business which is totally different than a funnel so there's a Marketplace quality team like what they care about is is driving some standard for quality for the suppliers on a Marketplace but there's not a linear kind of relationship between working on that kind of problem so if I let on a bunch of new Supply to a Marketplace probably the first thing that happens is our gmv or our Revenue goes up because we have all these new suppliers which can transact demand but if those are on average lower quality

it's going to degrade the kind of customer experience and reduce retention over time and so the model that they're trying to build is like how to manage that tension like it's similarly like in a fintech business or many more marketplaces now have fintech elements you're often underwriting the transaction that team is thinking about the tension between extending more credit and driving higher spend versus defaults on the other side like what's the contribution margin maximizing point at which we can offer credit and so their models are going to look pretty different than like what a growth team is managing got it so you mentioned this idea of archetypes and I was going to ask you when you think about developing a growth model for a company and with basis one the company that you ran before a fair you basically developed these things for startups and how many companies would you say you helped

through this process and help develop growth models for just to put that we probably built 20 or 30 of these in my

Nintendo base as well awesome it's probably more than anyone out there so I think that's like a context to set you've had more experience doing this than maybe anyone else out there but we won't compare are there archetypes slash templates slash tools that you have found useful to think about I'm coming in fresh to think about the growth model for a company what have you found helpful to get started to lay the groundwork yeah so I think one thing I'll say is going back to 50 of the value being figuring it out that actually like negates the value of templates in some way like you kind of want to build it up for yourself from first principles to understand how the business works so like the more painful the process of building it is the probably the more you're learning but I do think there's been a lot written on this that you can find online I think like the building blocks I talked about

are a useful starting place for how to put these together I also think reforge which is a product in grow school which we both know has done I think probably the most work to build this into a discipline and so if you want to go really deep on this my top recommendation would be to start with reforge okay so getting even more concrete you've built a lot of these growth models what's an actual example of a growth model you've built and more specifically what have you learned from the experience of building that growth model and either I guess I was going to say a fictional company but that let's go with a real company 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 into it because there's a lot of interaction between between having a healthy retained customer base and everything you care everything else you care about which is

the rate at which they're referring new customers generating content generating contribution margin and so it quickly makes it clear that actually getting a smaller percentage gain on retention is often much more valuable than making a bigger change in some other area and as a result you may be misallocated your product and growth resources in a pretty significant way so your point there is really important that the more you work on the stuff the more you will learn what actually is movable and the expected Roi on investments for Founders that are just getting started on this sort of stuff do you have any just general advice or guidance on okay retention is probably going to be very hard to move don't expect that metric even though it's your point that it's often the biggest lever you need just general guidance of here's where you probably will see impact here maybe you should now count on a ton how do you think

about that yeah I think so one like 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 so it may you may have some intuition around this for the core operating while the business is running this is a little bit different you need to start building in more variables but I would start there and start iterating on on the model I think like this process of where you have leverage to move it is very hard to Intuit so I think you just have to start and if there's a feedback loop between what the what kind of gains the team is putting up and how that impacts your model and over the course of multiple quarters of iterating on this you'll build much more intuition for what works awesome so say that somebody has been listening to this episode maybe they've heard it they've listened to it three

times now and they're just like hey I got a model that kind of feels like the beginnings of something what do you do once you have a growth model how does it actually inform what you do as a startup it's a very helpful input into a quarter quarterly or annual planning process depends a little bit on the stage of the company but say you're at the stage where you have maybe 10 or 20 product pots which are allocated across various parts of the business and you're going through annual planning often you want to do a zero-based accounting exercise where we say we want to from the ground up decide how those people should spend their time and there's some kind of pod allocation exercise where we're deciding which which places those go to the most difficult thing about making that kind of effort is developing a common currency by which you can trade off their efforts so like this team is saying they can move this metric by X

and this team is moving this metric by y I have no way to make those two things comparable the growth model is the function that lets you do that and so you can have this analyst or this Finance person we talked about who is operating this model work with the product managers to run those scenarios through this model and generate it into a common currency so now we have a spreadsheet which says these are the things we could work on this is roughly how it will impact our short or long-term growth now you have the ability to make much better kind of allocation decisions so would be like at the most macro level and I think the more micro one is for an individual product pod I had this Northstar goal which lever should I be pulling they should be using their mini models to make that uh make that assessment and if you look at like the strategy dock for a product group or team I think that and

having a model like this should be a core part of that because that way they can articulate what it is that actually

move them have you found a model of doing this exercise coming up with a growth model for a company or a startup that you've worked with radically shifted the way they think because they're an example that comes to mind if a lot we came up with this and they're like they didn't even know this was a huge lever and that changed the way they approach growth yeah I mean the the first time this was very eye-opening to me probably the first one I built was the one we built at Thumbtack in partnership with our finance team and it made it so immediately obvious that we were like exceptionally sensitive to the repeat rate of new customers we typically if you think about Thumbtack we offered a thousand categories it's a local Services Marketplace for people to hire electricians or plumbers or wedding planners and almost all the traffic came from very targeted sem or SEO on a specific kind of thing so they hire the

leadership initially it's very hard for us to then go upsell you into something else but the rate at which we did that made all the difference because it radically changed the LTV that customer which then fed back into how much we could go pay to acquire new customers and so we had a team that was primarily focused on optimizing that initial flow so SEO and conversion rate we shipped hundreds of experiments to increase our conversion rate we had done much less on the life cycle piece like how do we cross-sell you into these other things building this model helped us internalize that we needed to shift a bunch of kind of resources from top of funnel to deeper in the stack and that ultimately let's build a much much better customer Journey awesome your

point about retention being one of the biggest levers always is really reminds me at Airbnb there's like a dive ones or a data dive ones where the data scientist found that same conclusion man if we move retention by one percent it's gonna we're gonna hit all our goals and we tried and it was just very hard and I'm curious how often do you find that you can actually meaningfully move retention or is there anything that you've found to be effective in increasing retention for many of the companies they worked in yeah I think retention is a tough measure to work on because it is the culmination of the entire product experience like whether people come back or not has to do with everything that they experienced along the way and so I think that the primary advice is actually if you were trying to remove a retention style metric rarely should you go right to the source and send them more email or push

notification or something like that it's really actually about understanding what is the customer experience and what matters to them and in a Marketplace context it's often depth of Supply or the interaction they have with Supply so you're actually you actually should be working more on core product levers than you are on call it growth product leverage to move retention so it's a deep understanding of that customer journey and where you actually have the opportunity to prove it if you can share or any idea any example comes to mind is there what's like one of the biggest successes you've seen in increasing retention very often I think the biggest wins in retention come from inflecting the early user experience so if you're 3 6 12 months out usually a customer has formed a pretty strong opinion about whether or not they like this product and have a pretty good understanding of it but in

that very first experience you have a lot of opportunity to teach them about why this is a valuable product and kind of prove to them that it's valuable and so the experience that have been most effective have been typically focused on very early early life cycle and 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 so if you take like Lyft or Uber for example a an Uber driver signs up for the service us some of them just by luck of the draw are going to make a pretty bad hourly rate because like customer canceled on them or they were just in a low density area there was some problem with their experience that driver doesn't know that's not how it works they might think we just I just make three dollars an hour on this platform and they're never going to come back and so if you can Target

streamlining that experience or homogenizing that experience it's typically very helpful this is why you see both of those companies dueling it out to guarantee the highest first week or first month earning what they're trying to do is prove to you that this is what the experience is going to be like longer term and you pull up all those below average first experiences to average and drive much better retention curves going forward amazing such a great example and story it makes me think about this work that I imagine every company ends up doing which is what are leading indicators of future retention and I'm curious if you've had success doing that I find there's always these like obvious things that you can't do much about to increase retention down the road and there's always this idea of building some ml model that's like anticipating retention based on some behaviors that some someone takes if you

had any experience any success with those sorts of Investments 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 and it almost never works that way because there's something unique about that customer their experience which is driving it and so these correlational exercises I put very little weight in because I've like rarely been able to move bucket B into the better bucket a for example so I think it's much more about understanding where the real drivers of value are how to create that like really good first run experience to prove to them awesome and it's interesting that onboarding comes up a lot on these conversations just the power of onboarding and how much effect that has down the road you're to your point people often want to increase retention by focusing on

people about to turn and this is a great reminder that your biggest level covers early on when they're just experiencing yeah so yeah the flip side is absolutely true right working on early user experience is highly impactful you often see product teams say we should work on Resurrection because we have this huge pool of users that has churned out like if we get just one percent of those people back it's going to be such a big lip the problem is that pool of users is the group of people who has tried the product and decided they don't want to use it and so it's very hard to convince them otherwise usually much higher leverage to focus on new users and as a result like typically you want to wait to spin up Resurrection efforts until you've exhausted some of these earlier funnel efforts

so I want to transition a bit to talking about marketplaces I honestly can't think of anyone that's worked on more Marketplace companies than you maybe Jeff Jordan at a16z who's invested in Airbnb and worked at eBay and Open Table ice companies but I feel like you have so much insight into how to grow and run a Marketplace and so I'm really excited to get into stuff here my first question just were you excited about marketplaces what gets you continuously interested in working at marketplaces and why are they such interesting and good businesses why is a Marketplace a good business I think the first thing is it's like a perfect fit for the Venture model which is why everybody's so interested in them right they're like they're very hard to get started super Capital intensity to get started but once they're rolling they're very hard to stop you get these kind of compounding defensibility and gains that

makes them very hard to stop and as a result as a Marketplace grows you see these crazy things in the metrics which you don't see for most other businesses so typically as you acquire more and more customers you're acquiring the marginally good customer over time and your cacs go up your ltvs go down it gets harder and harder Marketplace is actually the inverse like the supply liquidity is improving the experience is improving so often actually as you see later cohorts and marketplaces cat goes down LTD goes up you see this crazy inversion where the business gets better and better over time and so that's I think one of the reasons they're such great businesses I think to your question on on why they're fun to work on I think everything is just harder every question is more complex and so that's made them I think really fun fun to work on for me and that's interesting coming back to your first point about

marketplaces uh or for it to start but once they're started they become cheaper to grow and you build moats and work effects feels like you as a advisor and person that works on Marketplace so the same thing happens the fact that you've worked at so many marketplaces makes it more interesting and fun I imagine because you've seen so much of this and so many people haven't experienced this and so there's like almost a Dan hockenmeyer Network effect I appreciate that I mean I think there's a there's a few folks in this community who've worked with a bunch of marketplace and you start to see the same topics over and over so it's really fun to riff with that group on these comments this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation a b testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams companies like netlify contentful and Cameo rely on Apple to power their experiments

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okay so we're thinking about

marketplaces one of the biggest questions people ask about marketplaces is how do you know if they're going well what are Health metrics what are kpis that you find are most helpful to think about when evaluating the health of a Marketplace I can give you a couple pretty obvious ones or basic ones and a couple that a little bit more nuanced so on that in that first bucket certainly you need to look at some measure of GMB or transactions you need something that brings together both the supply and demand side to make sure it's working and that's typically your ultimate North Star of which everything else flatters up to I think the second would be a deep understanding of unit economics because the dynamic I talked about where they're hard to get started means that most Marketplace in the early days have pretty poor or maybe even negative unit economics instacart famously was losing money on every order Uber was losing

money on every drive and so I think understanding that and the components that lead up to is very important part of understanding your Marketplace so those would be the tube kind of obvious ones I think other two that I would look at beyond that number one is liquidity and this is a really broad term that people Define in a bunch of different ways the definition I would give is how reliable is the marketplace if the consumer is looking for something or suppliers looking to sell something how often can they do that thing that they're trying to do and ideally you want to express this metric in the form of a dimension or a type of product experience that customer really cares about so for Uber Lyft wait time is a classic example 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 for a Commerce Market typically it's some form of conversion rate or search to film metric so if I go look for this thing on Amazon how often can I find it and convert and so by by articulating what the customer cares about and where this threshold is you can tell when you have a liquid Marketplace and essentially until you have a liquid Marketplace really nothing else matters and so this should be the primary thing you're focused on defining and then building tours and this is why you hear a lot of advice to marketplaces to basically cut scope down to specific geography or a specific category so you can focus on generating liquidity in that area before you can then scale it elsewhere so this is like the number one I think metric for a Marketplace and then the last one I'll give it is share of wallet so this is effectively for your buyer how much

of their total spend are you getting on your marketplace's versus alternatives for your seller how much of the business that they're doing is you versus others so for Uber drivers if they spend x amount of hours driving per week how much are you getting versus Lyft or doordash or something else for a retailer unfair if they're buying to shop stock their store how much of the product on their shelf came from their reverse from somewhere else these are very important metrics for us to understand one to the obvious reason that like as it goes up your ltvs go up and you have a much better business but probably more importantly than that the higher it is the less likely a customer is to multi-tenant meaning use another Marketplace or another service and ideally you want one want that customer to commit to using just this Marketplace and the higher share of wallet is the more likely that is but I will say that

it's very hard typically to get this to happen on both sides of the marketplace simultaneously so often you have to pick your leverage point which one do you think you can actually drive very high share of wallet on awesome okay so just to summarize the metrics that you find to be most helpful in tracking your Marketplace Health there's these two that are just general Business Health metrics GMD and unit economics then there's I think what's most unique to marketplaces which is liquidity and essentially it's just like how often or have people having a good time on both sides of the marketplace and I love the way you broke it up like for Uber to be like how quickly do the car for most marketplaces it's just like what percent of the time do you get something that you want like fill rate basically and then share a wallet which to me feels like even again going back to the first kind of bucket of just raw

at least this business going well maybe it's a you think about that separately versus like just like business growth and how much we're making as do you feel like share wallet is like a different category of metric I do think share wallet is different for this reason like if you could if you could tell me we could grow GMD 10 by getting 10 more customers or by getting 10 of more of our current customers wallet I would take the latter because you now have a deeper relationship with them which tells you something more about the future retention and defensibility of the marketplace so I think it's basically a measure of depth rather than breadth and I will take depths every time in a Marketplace awesome you worked on consumer and B2B marketplaces and so I'm curious do you find sure wallet is important on both types of marketplaces or is it a lot more important in B2B so you typically have some form of business on the supply

side of a Marketplace like maybe it's a pseudo business that's effectively a consumer but you can almost always measure some form of share of wallet on on the supply side of a Marketplace no matter what on the consumer side it's your B2B Marketplace you typically have a cleaner share of wallet metric but it's not always the case for Consumer businesses sweet and again just to clarify share wallet is essentially percentage of spend in a say a problem space that they're giving to you so for fair it'd be like the retailers what percentage of their vendors come through fare exactly if you look at their shelf in their store what percentage of that shelf came from Fair versus something else awesome

another constant question Marketplace Founders have is whether they should focus on Supply or demand and I know it's never black and white but do you have any general advice on where to focus yeah I mean the answer is is obviously both to some extent I think you can't ignore either side 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 and I think there's a couple reasons for this one is Supply is disproportionately important early on because it is the product like until you have enough Supply you don't have anything and so you do have to focus on it to to a high degree early on and two is often the supply side by Marketplace is using the product more deeply there's more product surface area and you need more product resources on the supply side um however I think this tricks people into thinking that that's the

optimization function or you think you should think more about Supply I think 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 because if you go to a supplier um you know a restaurant or an electrician or a driver and say I have this customer for you that I can give to you at a rate that's going to make you money they're always going to say yes and so demand is the currency and so when you think about trade-offs or how to optimize a business I think taking the perspective of the customer or the demand side is always the right one I think there's a really important Nuance here and there's actually a little mini Twitter debate built early I think a while ago where he made the same point that in the end the most important thing you got to get right is aggregate all the demand you need to become the

place people come to to transact in that space But oftentimes the way you do that is acquire Supply that is hard to acquire and so would you agree with that often it's just yes prioritize the customer experience but that may be you need to spend most of your time acquiring Supply so that they're happy absolutely and and the culmination of those two points is you only should acquire supply to the extent you understand how it impacts demand and so for example if we go back to this liquidity metric there is some point for a market for Uber where you don't want more Supply because you're no longer reducing wait times or doing something that improves the customer experience in a meaningful way and similar to the the kind of pet store example on Amazon there's some amount of Supply where you're probably no longer incrementally improving the pet buyers experience and so it's probably not worth investing

those dollars and so supplies are critically important but has to be framed from what is the customer benefit that I've tried and another way to put that is what's the biggest constraint to your Marketplace growth right right while we're in that topic do you have

any just like rough heuristic that you use to understand which side is most constrained this may be a big question that isn't answerable in a short answer but any thoughts there yeah one is I've actually become less and less focused on pure Marketplace balance metrics they are important to monitor so ratio of buyers to sellers um some of these other things but actually the thing that matters is can you write an Roi equation for acquiring supply and demand which fully internalizes the marketplace Dynamic and so I mean by this is like you're acquiring a new customer you need to include the cack of acquiring that customer but also the cack of acquiring the supply for that customer to purchase which is based on some ratio between the two and similarly on the supply side that business can't make a sale unless you also acquire the customer to acquire them that to transact with them and so if you have dual sided Roi equations

which are appropriately capturing this Dynamic I actually think you can somewhat ignore Marketplace balance and just push your acquisition all the way out to the payback period that you're comfortable with on either side I think the one exception to this would be are there externalities which you can't capture in this equation so for example if you have too little demand for Uber drivers at some point do they just become disillusioned with the service switch to Lyft talk badly about it on social media you do have to look out for like extreme low Supply or demand scenarios but generally my view is build really strong Roi models that account for this and then just push to your threshold I like the sound of these Roi models do you have any guidance for folks to come up with these models in some way or is that a whole Master Class of its own so there's a lot of nuance by business but the basic formulation is

CAC for this side you're focused on so let's take Uber again for example cap to acquire a rider and then an additional amount of CAC loaded on for for the supply the drivers that you're um acquiring times the ratio of drivers to supply you're acquiring at that time so basically like do I need one driver for every 10 passengers like we then take the cack of that passenger times 10 of a driver that gives you CAC and then you compare that to the LTV the customer and that allows you to calculate payback period now there's a lot of nuance when you get into an actual Marketplace because often they're referring other sides of the marketplace or other things are happening but that's a basic formulation well okay Mission Duo an actual master class on this formula concoction a question I wanted to cover also is I find that for early stage marketplaces Founders sometimes over focus on like the theory of

marketplaces and how all this stuff that people have put out including yourself and others about just like how to think about Marketplace all the complexity there but I find that oftentimes it's

simpler just to think of a Marketplace like like 90 something percent of your success is going to be the same things that any business will have to deal with growth and profit and retention all these things and then there's like these additional layers that make it Marketplace more complicated and so just just to double click on that last piece what have you found to be most different about working on a Marketplace business versus non-marketplace business yeah it's a good question so I think that effectively every decision you make at a Marketplace has a second order consequence that you need to think through and maybe maybe third and fourth are were consequences at that but take something like pricing it's like this is a pretty complicated topic no matter what but if you're looking at a SAS business and you're trying to figure out how to price your subscription theoretically you can draw a curve which

says as my price goes up fewer are going to convert and so just find the optimal point on that curve where we're managing the tension between more customers versus more Revenue per customer but if you take a Marketplace typically you're charging Commission on the supply side and the sensitivity their sensitivity to that commission is much harder to understand because theoretically if they can transact and rate that makes them money like they'll sign up all the way to that that like highest possible commission you could charge the more you charge the more you can fund benefits for your customers so if Amazon charges a higher commission they can fund more returns and faster shipping for their customers and so what's the right balance between charging more and and maybe kind of discouraging Supply from signing up to charging to getting more benefits to demand and encouraging their decided so this is like a it's very hard

to model that kind of relationship there's not a simple curve that describes and so many decisions follow this same pattern and one thing 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 SAS 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 like drives this long-term effect two months later and then you're gonna be pulling your hair out too much 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 the marketplace be very careful particularly if you've got something that's working on playing with those variables I love that metaphor and your point about pricing reminds me your colleague at Fair Carla pelicano she led the pricing recommendations team at Airbnb it was like a team of I don't know probably 100 people that were just dedicated to pricing figuring out what prices to recommend to hosts how to get them to adopt these recommendations building a model to actually come up with the recommendations and so it's your point pricing is such a complex beast and especially at a Marketplace absolutely and in general Carlo's been such an incredible force in growing our team and helping us think more rigorously about marketplaces this is like one of the things I mentioned at the start that makes fair so far is we've got a lot of people like this that

are just so fun to rip with on Marketplace problems there's so many X Airbnb people at Fair things that means there seems to be a magnet for the Airbnb so whatever you're doing keep that up um another topic that I wanted to chat about is expanding marketplaces and just the idea of thinking about where you expand to when you markets new verticals and then also horizontal versus vertical marketplaces but first how do you think

about the idea of expanding your Marketplace once you've got a foothold in a specific area I've been fortunate to work on marketplaces that are in these like massive massive Industries which is actually true for a lot of marketplace because they tend to have winner take all Dynamics in really big markets and so you get these really huge tanks so like you know locals the local Services industry for Thumbtack or the global wholesale industry for fair like these are meaningful percentages of global GDP they're like huge markets and as a result they're really frustrating to work on and also really fun to work on because you have this thing where like there's 10 big opportunities that are just one click away from your core business and they're all seem like really good ideas to do so like how do you actually prioritize between doing those different things and one thing I've learned here is that actually be on

a certain point Tam are the size of the market actually matters very little because these are all big enough that they would dramatically inflect the curve of the business if you make them work it's much more relevant to focus on a couple things one is like how adjacent is that to the business as a proxy for can we actually go get it so if you think about like instacart setup options it makes much more sense for them to expand into convenience stores which they have then into retailer to traditional retailers because the convenience store looks much more like their current models like high frequency shipping speed matters a lot development speed matters a lot and so it's much more likely their current model is going to work there than trying to expand into something else and that's the right prioritization function for them to think about versus like is retail slightly bigger Market that could be in

stores and the second thing is like are there places that you can accentuate your network effect by expanding into new markets and what I mean by that is are there places where you can use the same supplier or a consumer has demand for multiple things and so it makes your Marketplace Stronger versus trying to spin up a new network so like for Uber it makes all the sense in the world to have ubereats because one they're the same drivers in many cases but two the customer wants rides and meals and so it you automatically have this built-in Supply base where if they try to do something that was like one click further away from this it would be much less important to them and so I think that's the way to prioritize new bets that is such an interesting point that basically if you're thinking about the upside of a Marketplace think less about just the total Tam of all the adjacent Marketplace opportunities in the markets around them

and more about how easily it'll be for you to expand into them even if they're smaller exactly awesome I think there's yeah there's one other lesson here which I've learned a few times which is that product is the thing that matters when expanding so because of this Dynamic we talked about where liquidity is so important and there's like a race to get there like the first person the liquidity wins you often see this arms race where people will spend a huge amount of money on go to market and incentives to like bootstrap the market and that is an important part of the strategy because it actually does matter who who drives liquidity faster but I've learned over and over and over that that's actually not the main thing it's who can deliver an incredible end-to-end customer experience first even if for a smaller number of customers because that's what creates the flame where actually like customers are really loving it retain

talking about it and you can then expand from there and so the other big learning from from expanding a Marketplace is don't let go to market get too far ahead of product you need to keep those two pieces in lockstep as you're expanding this touches on a really common piece of advice for marketplaces which is don't focus on gmv and growth rates and just expansion early on but instead focus on getting a flywheel going even if it's small to show that you could make people happy and you can give people what they're looking for is there anything you can add there or talk about yeah I think that's exactly right and the reason this is the right advice is because everything else follows proving you have a good customer experience like you even if it's you have very few customers if your cohorts look really good they're retaining or even kind of like you know like you said the classic smiling curve where you see

more in engagement later in the life cycle than you do earlier that's the thing that gives the company conviction to invest resources against it that's the reason that BCS are going to want to invest rather than a bunch of kind of low quality G and B in any Market awesome speaking of VCS investing and expanding marketplaces something that I've noticed is a lot of marketplaces try to find a SAS business to build on top of their Marketplace and find some kind of recurring Revenue component and then in reverse a lot of SAS businesses look for how do we add a Marketplace to what we're doing I'm curious how often you find that this actually works out and what do you have to get right to add this other type of business model on top of something that's working so broadly I will say I think it's easier for a Marketplace to go SAS than is the other direction and the reason for that is two things one is

it's a new capability to to generate demand which is fundamentally what a Marketplace has to do and it's a higher value activity this is why like the the effective Commission of a Marketplace often 10 15 20 is much higher than the effective Commission of a SAS business into two to three percent range so you're just doing much more of the value chain in the marketplace and second is the marketplace by definition starts with relationships on both sides but the SAS business does not have any relationships with the demand side customer and so they have to acquire a whole new type of demand to make this work it's not to say it can't work there's actually like a classic kind of SAS bootstrap to Marketplace Playbook this is what OpenTable did I think we should actually see some new examples of companies doing this like one in the health Healthcare space is solved they built some interesting products for

healthcare clinics that they're now bootstrapping into the marketplace and so I think it's possible but I think it's very difficult and then for a Marketplace the lens you should take is much less about how to drive more monetization but just how do we create a much better experience for our customers because there's some painful thing that they're doing today that we can build for them instead and so how do we better integrate with the way that they're running their back office or accounting systems is a classic example places where you can make it much much better and in the process you're often making their lives easier but you're also making your product much stickier your retention will go up as a result of this as I think if you take the lens of what's the customer pain we're solving it's you'll be much more effective than like how do we get a few more points of a margin out of this customer if a

Founder was coming to you and they're like hey Dan we are a Marketplace and we're thinking about adding a SAS product on top would you one try to discourage them from that and if two that doesn't work what would you suggest that they focus on most I mean I think the first thing is looking at those core metrics we talked about do they have a really liquid high performance Marketplace first like that has to be the optimization function and before you're there I don't think you should be thinking about some of these expansion levers and the second would be like show me the customer problem or the reason it's so hard to engage with this Marketplace today that we need to build like a deep set of tools or products for this customer to solve and if both of those things are true then I think maybe it's quite interesting but I think more often than not it's better to focus on the on the core Marketplace awesome

another common question that Marketplace Founders have is should I go vertical or should I go horizontal so thinking about eBay as an example they are very horizontal you could buy anything you want on eBay and then there's all these spin-offs that emerged like just classic cars eBay for classic cars eBay for guitars and I'm curious if you have any advice there for either a nurse stage founder trying to decide should I go horizontal or vertical and or where do you find the biggest opportunities to slice off a piece of a successful horizontal Marketplace yeah absolutely and in that eBay example there are now a few quite successful examples of this like like goat and stockx or two where they like carved out the sneaker category and the key Insight was like you couldn't trust the inventory you were getting on eBay so there's a lot of work you need to do to verify and those businesses just did it

much better than eBay broadly though I think that we over hyped the idea of unbundling so I think every six months I've seen articles in me wrote this is the unbundling of Reddit the unbundling of LinkedIn the unbundling of Facebook we're going to take all those blue links that you saw another site and they're all going to become new businesses and very rarely that thesis plays out and I think the core like 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 and so I'd like to unpack that if you look at ux like if you built a LinkedIn for just for construction workers or just for Architects or just for investment bankers like you could definitely build some of features that group liked better than like the core LinkedIn experience but then you have to weigh that against

all of the benefits of being broader and so like the the two to two big pieces of where you get benefits from scale are in your custom reality and then I think the network effect you can build so if you go back to that Thumbtack example we had a spreadsheet which tracked hundreds of verticalized competitors where somebody would try to pick off the electricians category the wedding category the lessons category and very few of them got traction for the simple reason that we could upsell customers into a thousand things and so our customer ltu is always higher and we would always win when we were bidding against those other customers on sem keywords that were relevant to that category so it's like it becomes very hard to compete if you're picking off this kind of like narrow thing unless you find something which that sub segment is itself very high frequency or very high dollar value so like airbnb's example with that they

unbundled from Craigslist because they picked off this massive high frequency high dollar value category in that word oh but there's not that many of those examples and then I think the other source of benefit would be the network effect so if you go back to LinkedIn for example I think actually There's an opportunity and we see some successful businesses picking off now blue collar works there's a company called work rides I think these should be called rig up where they're basically building like a LinkedIn but for a blue collar work and that works really well because it's a huge segment and it's somewhat self-contained but for most other things there's a lot of fluidity between the employers and the employees in terms of like their like who wants to interact with one another and so if you're an investment banker you don't really want to be on like the LinkedIn investment banker because you're probably in the

future you're going to want some other jobs you want to be in like the biggest Network that's relevant to you and so this is why you can complain about linkedin's UI all day but they have a very strong place in the market because of that Network effect so broadly I think there are some pretty interesting examples places where you can unbundle but they're rarer than people think that is amazing there's so much value in what you just shared so one one takeaway I have here is you have an opportunity to unbundle split off into a vertical Marketplace potentially if there's high order value and high frequency and the third piece is like there's a almost a self-contained Network that doesn't benefit significantly from the rest of the network for example I like I love the rig up example like I doubt oil rig operators are on LinkedIn and when something comes around that's like oh all my buddies are on this thing I'm

going to be on there you don't need the rest of LinkedIn the first piece that was interesting so Airbnb I wouldn't say is high frequency I'd say it's just very large high order value and so I wonder if you just need one or the other really in a big way really high order value or really high frequency this is a good point probably what you're solving for is customer LCD and you can get that in multiple places there's not that many things which are both high frequency and high dollar value so you can do both I do think if you go to a place that is low frequency it comes with all kinds of new challenges because without frequency customers forget about you and so what is the hook to get them to come back do you have to reacquire traffic it creates a whole other set of problems but if you can get it right I can hear BB case and work really well yeah Thumbtack is a classic example of how often you need a

plumber and even with the thousands of services that you all had from what I understand I've still struggle to get people to come back often and remember Thumbtack when they had oh I have an electrician oh yeah Thumbtack that's right initially it's very difficult I mean the average person hires eight or ten new professionals a year the average homeowner and so that's decently high frequency but it's not food delivery or a ride sharing or something like that it's it's coming back to fair so far is

one of the maybe few really successful B2B marketplaces and it's always felt like there's this Gap in B2B marketplaces you always feel like there should be many more like why are there so many consumer marketplaces but so few B2B and I'm curious what's your take there do you think there's a rising trend of B2B marketplaces do you think this is always going to be a smaller collection what's your feeling so I do think we'll see more of them part of the reason we've seen fewer is this there are fewer potential Founders who understand B2B problems because most of them are consumers and so the consumer use cases are more obvious so if you take fare for example when I met the founders probably five years ago now I immediately understood what they were talking about but only because I had run an e-commerce business in the past and I like had the experience of dealing with a hundred suppliers and line sheets and

PDFs going back and forth and pricing not being right and just like how painful it is to be a retail buyer and data solution which is much better in that clicked but it had I had the same conversation five or ten years ago with the team at Convoy like I don't know anything about Trucking I probably wouldn't have understood why that business is just going to work and so I think there's partly that there's just the discovery process takes longer for that reason but I think the reason we won't see a huge explosion in this area is that B2B also comes with something else which is much lower fragmentation in many cases and you need fragmentation for a good Marketplace like the more concentrated either side of your Market is the more leverage they have the less likely they are to need you and the less likely they are to be willing to pay a high commission you made that point to me once when we were talking about

marketplaces years ago and that's so stuck with me that when evaluating marketplaces in B2B especially usually the reason it's not going to work is just it's not fragmented enough and just to double click there you can explain what that means what does fragmentation

mean in the marketplace context and then are there any examples of really low fragmentation if this will never work as a market your place and then here's really high and this is why it's working fragmentation is basically just a measure of how many total businesses are there in the space relative to the transaction volume in that space and you took the top five percent of suppliers in the space what percentage of the total volume are they doing and the higher that percentage is the less fragmented you are and the challenge that creates for a Marketplace is if there's 10 companies in space that are doing 80 of the volume it's very important for me to have a relationship with those 10 companies but those 10 companies are also big enough to have their own sales teams have their own internal operations they just need less from the marketplace and as a result they're gonna be willing to pay less

then you're also probably going to see many more problems with this intermediation which is when the supplier and the customer go around the marketplace because they can just transact themselves like one one principle to use here is like how many total dollars are attached to each transaction in the marketplace when it goes above a certain amount it becomes much more attractive to figure out how to go around the marketplace like with ride sharing example the absolute dollars of commission on a ride is two or three dollars is it worth it for the driver to like figure out how to call the passenger two minutes in advance go around uber and pick them up and maybe you probably see some of that happening but usually not but now take like you know there's a bunch of people in the kind of material space within B2B marketplaces they're like you have manufacturers of say beauty products you need to Source aerosol cans and all the

inputs into making beauty products there's not that many of these big suppliers and each of their transactions may be tens of thousands of dollars hundred thousand dollars millions of dollars the commission you would charge in that order is too high because I as a supplier would rather just pick up the phone and call this person and save those tens of thousands of dollars and so like you just run into these kind of like fundamental problems where the marketplace doesn't work anymore that makes sense basically like how much value are you bringing to this market and if it's not enough where you can charge anything meaningful to run a business is just not going to work and so yeah that's a really good way of framing it final question around marketplaces and broadly and I'll let you go you've spent

a lot of time on marketplaces is seeing their evolution you've worked on this maybe for the past decade where do you see the future of marketplaces going I actually wrote a blog post on this where we charted the commission that a Marketplace charges and the year they were founded and if you put those on the X and Y axis there's this very clear up into the right Trend like newer marketplaces are charging higher commissions and they're doing more work to justify those commissions and so like broadly the evolution looks like kind of like Marketplace 1.0 which is all they're doing is aggregated demand so that's like Zillow and Home Advisor they're basically like lead gen and their commission rate is often pretty low it's like five percent maybe ten percent then you have a managed Marketplace like Airbnb or Etsy which did something like really fundamental on top of that which is generate trust so they dead Edge

Supply like you could probably tell me more about what Airbnb did in this space but like they they made it a safe transaction and there's a lot of work it takes to make that transaction trustworthy and safe and so they charge a higher commission as a result there's then one click beyond that which like for lack of a better term would you could call like a heavily managed Marketplace but now they're typically doing like some work in the value chain which is distinct from just aggregating domains so like you know doordash and instacart own Logistics they took over Logistics and as a result like 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 as a result they could charge more to the restaurant similarly Fair we actually underwrite the transaction like we take the risk if that transaction falls

through or the retailer defaults fare eats that and so we're playing it like much more fundamental place in that transaction but like as you play this out like what happens at the end of this Continuum like ultimately you're charging 100 commission and you're not a Marketplace anymore and so I think as we think about the future of marketplaces like one important question is which Marketplace are going to tend towards evolving out of the marketplace model altogether and which will stay in Marketplace mode in equilibrium and you see these examples as already like people talk about Open Door as a Marketplace but it's not it's an e-commerce website which has the highest price points you can imagine because you're buying houses right but there's no like supplier on the other side they've already bought the house so like it's just e-commerce and I think many markets will go that way and I think the

variable to me that matters in deciding which case you're going to have whether they consolidate or not is how much creativity there is in the space so like how much do you need the supplier to be coming up with interesting new things for your customers to buy with what the customer cares about is actually like commodization like they want the same experience every time then you're ultimately going to evolve away from Marketplace I think like with ride sharing basically what I want is like a clean car that shows up on time and gets me there every time and so like as soon as autonomous vehicles arrive we're gonna fully consolidate that industry and it's not going to be Marketplace model anymore on the other end you have like Etsy and Amazon I think fares in this bucket steam the video game marketplaces in this bucket where the thing you care about is suppliers bringing you like amazing creative new

things and that's like something that big companies are really bad at doing so they like need the marketplace suppliers to supply this and so I think those businesses stay in Marketplace mode longer longer term and in the middle like I don't exactly know how to call what happens in food delivery like you do want some standardization elements but you also want the local restaurants and so does doordash win at a cloud kitchen model win I think it's like a little bit harder to understand but I do think that's kind of the variable that's determining what where the featured Marketplace they're going it's interesting to think about this like Event Horizon for when a Marketplace is no longer a Marketplace is a simple way to think about that being when you don't when you actually own Supply when you own the supply you're no longer a Marketplace when you don't own the supply you are is that anything about

that yeah that's a good a good mental perhaps like another way to say owning a supply is when there's no longer a direct transaction between supply and demand so that's what Open Door took out for example like you're not transacting with the home seller you're transacting with open door and so that's my mind no longer marked place because you also um eliminate some of the marketplace mechanics we were talking about a bit awesome and this has been incredible I feel like we've achieved our goal of getting really deep into the Weeds on growth models and marketplaces to final questions for you where can folks find you online if they want to learn more reach out and how can listeners be useful to you yes I'm on Twitter at Dan hockenmeyer and then LinkedIn people should feel free to to reach out you know I think the most useful thing is we're always growing our team at fair and so for folks who are interested in

this space I would love to love to uh to connect with them where do they go to learn more and apply for fair is fair.com or fair.com careers and that's fair with an e at the end that's correct yes awesome all right Dan thank you for being here thank you so much for the time thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode