Acquisition Channel Strategy

"Launch a non-core product offering that gets attention, which reflects attention toward your brand and/or core product."

"Running a promotion on your existing product, giving people a reason to pay attention and act."

"In paid, we invest based on a ‘Time to Contribution Margin Break-Even.’ We don't invest on an LTV basis because every market is different. To say we can predict unit economics of each business and market 5+ years into the future, would be naive."

"The way we think about it is if we put out $5 to acquire a customer at time zero, how many months does it take to generate $5 in contribution profit (everything above fixed OpEx - like salary and rent)?"

"Turbo boosts—one-off growth spikes that quickly fade: PR (e.g. Snapchat Spectacles launch), Viral content (e.g. Dollar Shave Club video), Influencer posts (e.g. Kylie Jenner and Casper), Marketing campaigns (e.g. contest, giveaway, billboards)."

"Where you sit on this 2x2 is based on what you’re optimizing for (SEO vs. virality) and who’s generating the content (users vs. employees)."

"Is your goal to bring SEO traffic, to drive virality, to build your brand, or to enable sales? Make sure you’re clear on this."

"Our first strategy on YouTube was SEO: creating videos that answer questions people are looking for (i.e. ‘pitch deck’). Once we built an audience, we produce content focused on the YouTube algorithm: focused on high CTRs, high watch time, topics that appeal to broad audiences and sharing."

"Instead of going directly to your prospects, go through intermediaries who already have access and trust with your audience. ... a flywheel emerges when you properly implement this overarching strategy: your ecosystem partners create and distribute content, you amplify and repurpose their efforts, together you drive greater reach and credibility, new customers and partners come on board, and the cycle strengthens with each turn."

"You’re likely familiar with the individual tactics within an ecosystem strategy: influencer and creator relationships, channel partnerships, developer relations, communities, product integrations, and customer marketing. But the growth unlock doesn’t come from any one of these activities on their own."

"Since their product centers on trust, it’s smart to partner with high-trust creators who their (compliance-minded) audience already knows. It’s clear that a significant share of their paid spend now goes not just to billboards but to creators too."

"Ecosystem partners fuel inbound, add value and credibility to your outbound messages, accelerate product virality, make events more enticing, and ground lifecycle marketing in real use cases."

"Gamma built an ecosystem of micro-influencers across TikTok, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn to show off presentations built with Gamma’s AI design tool. They paid them not just to post but offered a bonus for virality. They also extensively catalogued successful hooks and formats to make this scale."

"The Postgres development platform and database became the default backend for vibe-coding products like Lovable. As these companies grew, so did Supabase. In addition to these “integration” partners, Supabase’s open source community shared docs, tutorials, and videos, further driving growth and building credibility."

"What is a sales channel? It’s a route to market for a product or set of products. It can range from your website to a sophisticated sales force. Selecting the right channel is critical for any business—and products often fail because the company chose the wrong route to market."

"To break through the noise, and often to even raise money, you need a unique distribution advantage. You need to find a way to go directly to your early target audience more cheaply and quickly than your competition."

"At scale, there’s essentially only one winning strategy: Become world-class at one growth channel (performance marketing, virality, content, or sales) within your market."

"Start building an audience, ideally on a platform that draws the type of people you’ll eventually want to sell to."

"Tinker with new platforms (e.g. VR, Snapchat apps, Substack, etc.) when they do launch to see if they are worth investing in, and check out Mike Maples’s writing on inflection points for inspiration on what to look for."

"Come up with a list of potential partners and ask yourself what you can do to help them achieve their goals. Then go find someone at these companies to pitch, and figure out how long it might take to actually launch something together."

"The next best (a.k.a. cheapest) way to learn of new products is to see people on the internet (organically) talking about them. This includes seeing social media posts, press, influencers organically sharing something, comments in a forum, Wirecutter articles, and organic search results, etc."

"Many new products are discovered by people simply happening upon them while being out and about in the world—noticing a new cereal on the shelf, seeing a Tesla drive by, peeping a Peloton sitting in a friend’s home. This is an effective growth channel for physical products that: Look great, Are prevalent, Are impulse purchases."

"This is traditionally a hard channel to measure a return on investment in, but can build a massive brand moat if done well (e.g., Nike, Apple, and Coke). It’s also a powerful tactic to get the attention of a certain audience in a specific location, such as Brex heavily leveraging billboards and bus stops in SF to get the attention of founders."

"Direct mail particularly has become a staple of DTC product growth strategies, and podcast and newsletter ads have been an increasingly popular way to get in front of new customers. This channel is best suited to: Companies that sell a subscription, or high average order value (AOV), products that can sustain the cost of this type of advertising."

"This channel is best suited to products: That have high AOVs and high LTV (to support the cost of a sales team), That require hand-holding to be successful, That are just getting started and looking for their initial customers."

"Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy. A few like Product Hunt and Pinterest found success using a handful. No one found success from more than three."

"Tony and the team printed a bunch of flyers charging $6 for delivery and put them all over Stanford University. He and the team first wanted to see if there was demand. That was how it all started."

"Drew created a simple video, demoing the product, and published it on April 2007 on Hacker News with the title "My YC app: Dropbox – Throw away your USB drive. That video brought the first users to the emerging Dropbox."

"When Mark finished the site, we told a couple of friends. And then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which was, like, three hundred people. And, once they did that, several dozen people joined, and then they were telling people at the other houses."

"Posing as a home theater enthusiast or cinephile, he would join the conversation in communities geared toward DVD fanatics and movie buffs, befriend the major players, and slowly, over time, alert the most respected commenters, moderators, and website owners about this great new site called Netflix."

"Mileage is my term for taking one content idea or marketing asset and expanding upon it, repurposing it to various formats, and/or using the same research to create a new piece of content. In short, if you have no distribution plan, maybe wait on creating it."

"The easiest and fastest way to find your early users, and a large driver of early growth for about 20% of startups, is to reach out to your friends and former colleagues."

"Go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline (e.g. forums, Product Hunt, college campuses, Craigslist, etc.)"

"Some see all of their early growth come from just a single channel (e.g. Udemy and PR, Etsy and online and offline communities, Twitter and influencers)."

"If you’re a marketplace or platform (e.g. DoorDash, Cameo, Substack): 1. Reach out to targeted strangers (e.g. DM celebs, email owners) 2. Get physical placement (e.g. stickers, flyers)"

"Determine how you’ll grow (e.g. paid ads, word of mouth, or SEO) and then make sure your product roadmap is actively supporting this growth engine."

"Different attribution models will make one channel look better than another, which can cause political infighting in siloed organizations. The goal should be to make marketing perform better, which ultimately leads to more success and financial reward for everyone working at the company."

"You won’t succeed at growth long-term without deeply understanding and operationalizing attribution and incrementality. You risk endlessly spending money on seemingly good ideas that have exactly zero impact."

"Although it’s true you can never achieve 100% clarity in marketing measurement, you’d be surprised at how close you can get by combining the right techniques."

"Over 40% of the brands in the database are using at least two methods together, and around 20% use all three. ... Using multiple measurement methods is like getting a second opinion after visiting the doctor: it can help you make better decisions."

"Paid marketing becomes a business-model competition (who can turn this customer attention into enough value that they can bid more than anyone else for that attention)."

"Note, even though there are a limited set of strategies, there are infinite ways to be creative about how you execute each of them, e.g. Netflix infiltrating DVD forums, Hipcamp setting up tables outside REIs, Airbnb selling cereal."

"Labor marketplaces are generally heavily supply-constrained—meaning their growth is bottlenecked by their lack of supply—so it’s crucial that founders of labor marketplaces nail their supply growth strategy."

"No question, the single most popular channel for early supply growth in a labor marketplace, particularly for companies that focus on one type of role (e.g. nurses), is posting a generic role to an existing job board like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, or Craigslist."

"We saw a lot of success with ads on LinkedIn, FB, and Google. Also niche podcasts and newsletters. Surprisingly effective and low CAC."

"For us, we started by building a community. ... And then it grew to be a huge community, and this is back when every tech company said they had a pipeline problem, but we just kept growing, so we were like—we have the pipeline right here. Then we built the product for hiring from the community, which we’d been honing for 5 years."

"Right now CAC is low, and LTV is forever. Broad audience prospecting."

"These “sidecar” products help you attract a high-intent audience, add value to their experience (no paywall or gates required), and then nudge visitors to create an account (often to save their progress or take action on what they’ve learned)."

"Most of your growth will come from one of the top three: inbound self-service, inbound sales-assist, or outbound sales. Spend most of your time optimizing that channel."

"Free user growth: MoM growth in free/trial users [*Over 20% is great*]. Payback period: How long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a new customer from their subscription revenue [*Under 6 months is great*]."

"I recommend that you replace sign-ups as a core marketing KPI with activated sign-ups, which creates a stronger alignment between marketing and product. Then revisit your onboarding flow with the mindset of a low-intent user in order to spot opportunities to add more educational resources at pivotal moments."

"‘Kickstarts’ are unscalable tactics for acquiring your first 1,000 users. Once you get going, your strategy will shift to building a scalable growth engine, but for now, don’t worry too much about that."

"It’s important to remember that billboards and other OOH spots are broad-stroke mediums, so they work best for high-level brand awareness, rather than immediate pipeline generation. For B2B businesses especially, the reality is that only a fraction of your ideal customer profile is actually in the market right now."

"The most important thing is a simple and compelling creative concept—ideally one that elicits an emotional response. It doesn’t have to be humor (as we typically lean into), but it has to be easily understood and memorable."

"For out-of-home, it’s not enough to know who your ideal buyer is; you have to understand their physical habits—where they live, where they work, and how they move back and forth."

"The best tip I can give someone planning to invest in OOH for the first time is to get loud on social media when the campaign goes live. Hire a professional photographer to take photos of the placements to make it easy for team members, investors, and friends and family to post on social media."

"During the campaign, we saw a more than 25% uplift in branded search traffic and an over 70% increase in branded search clicks globally (social media is powerful!). We also sustained a 10% to 15% uplift after the billboards came down."

"With out-of-home advertising, you should make the investment because the logic makes sense. While you should try to get a directional read on OOH impact, you also have to use your best judgment around where your audience is and what message they respond to. Intuition can carry you far in marketing."

"We don’t just think of OOH as ads; we think of them as experiences. The more you integrate your OOH strategy with complementary channels, frequency and resonance go up—and the more effective each can be."