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

Paid marketing: Your tests generate paying customers with a healthy payback period

Who should be leading these efforts and making key decisions?

Dedicating a significant amount of cross-functional resources to the effort, including product, design, marketing, and engineeringInfluencing the core product roadmap and customer experience to optimize for the lane being pursued

STEP 1: VALIDATE

During the “validate” stage, it’s common for a product manager or marketer to own the process. The decision to commit to a lane is a whole-company decision which ultimately has to be made by the CEO, so this owner’s key job is to tee up the right information to allow the executive team to make well-informed decisions.

To help you through this process, we’ve developed a three-step framework:1. Validate that a lane is right for you2. Commit the necessary resources to give the lane a real shot3. Scale the investment to become world-class

During the “scale” stage, the original owner may be able to scale with the effort, or it may need to be owned by a more senior person.

Once you have committed to a lane and start to see meaningful results, the next phase is to become world-class at the lane. The hallmark of this third stage is overcoming diminishing returns. Virtually every customer acquisition channel becomes harder over time because you are acquiring lower and lower intent customers. This is often referred to as... See more

Ok, so there are three lanes and you need to win one of these lanes. How do you pick, and win, a lane?

One useful shortcut: Learn from analogous companies using a similar business model in a different market.