How Startups Die From Their Addiction to Paid Marketing at Andrewchen

- The point is, knowing that Paid Marketing is highly addictive and hard to scale down, all of us in the industry should always be thinking about the 2nd or 3rd channel, in addition to organic/WOM, to give us a way to wean off an ever-increasing ad budget.

- There’s a few scenarios where paid marketing is justified, but it’s situational. If your product has network effects that kick in after an activation point and really scale, you can use paid to help bootstrap that.

- Scale effects mostly work against you in paid marketing. The longer your campaigns run, the less effective they become – people start seeing your ads too often.

- The key insight here is that Paid Marketing is tricky to grow, at scale, as the primary channel. It’s highly dependent on both against external forces – competition and platform – as well as the leadership team’s psychology when things get unsustainable.