How Startups Die From Their Addiction to Paid Marketing at Andrewchen

Outside of the open web, email, and text, there isn’t a scaled D2C channel that is not controlled by a major platform. So the primary way that startups have to reach customers today is via paid acquisition. That’s why the question an investor asks today to a startup that is scaling is: where are you buying audience and what are your customer acqui

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Since this essay is targeting at startups, I’m going to mostly focus on the first few stages of the framework and the skills that it implies for your new hire. If you look at each stage, they roughly imply a different set of problems you are trying to face – first, finding product/market fit and building the initial “atomic network” — a stable set ... See more

In the second phase, the Tipping Point, usually the growth efforts to focus on a set expert skills to scale rather than explore. If you are working on a product in real estate that competes with Redfin, the expert skill is probably figuring out how to capture high-intent traffic — like SEO/SEM. If you are working on social apps, it’s probably viral... See more