Dan Hockenmaier: belief

Transcript context

…If a founder was coming to you and they're like, "Hey Dan, we are a marketplace and we're thinking about adding a SaaS 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. 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. The second would be show me the customer problem or the reason it's so hard to engage with this marketplace today that we need to build 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 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 spinoffs that emerged, just classic cars, eBay for classic cars, eBay for guitars. And I'm curious if you have any advice there for either an early 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?…

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