Dan Hockenmaier (00:00:00): One lesson I learned the hard way a bunch of times on this is that if you think about running a marketplace, you're basically like a gardener. You have to have a very light touch. If you're building a SaaS business, you're a construction worker, you're building the product and the features and selling it, and it's this very linear thing. For a marketplace, you're like messing 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 going to be pulling your hair out two months later trying to figure out what you did over here that made that thing happen. So I think that the main advice is like to tread lightly. When you're messing with the core incentives or mechanisms of a marketplace, be very careful, particularly if you've got something that's working on playing with those variables. Dan Hockenmaier (00:00:45): Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Dan Hockenmaier. I venture to say that Dan has worked on more marketplace startups than anyone else in the world, including helping scale Thumbtack in the early days, currently working at Faire where he is head of strategy and analytics and, through his consulting business, Faces One, where he's helped dozens of startups figure out their growth models and growth strategies. Dan Hockenmaier (00:01:20): 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 a g...