Paid Acquisition

“Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape or form, right? Like there, there's a ton of narrative that like focus on brand, go organic content, build all that base. That just takes too much t…”

“If you have poor conversion tracking, Meta doesn't know who those people are, and it just randomly targets people, and you, you'll have a super high CAC, you'll say, ah, pay doesn't work for me. I'd say most of the time, people haven't done the actual setup co…”

“You definitely want a strong MMM model and incrementality when you're, like, the moment you start spending north of a million dollars a month”

“For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap.”

“Less than 10% should be paid in the more scaled mature company can be 30, 40%, but anywhere over 50%, I would be very uncomfortable on the reliance on paid”

“You don't want your product to be at a point where. More than 50% of your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition. I think if that is happening, your core growth engine is broken”

“Within the current products in the red ocean market, I don't think you can live just with organic, and organic is very hard to get. So you need to start with paid”

“In fact, I would spend nothing really on paid in the beginning. I would be working just on organic.”

“We, I mean, we don't really. We barely touch paid.”

“Paid acquisition is a total drug. It makes everyone feel good because top of funnel numbers move up, and once you see those, you know, weekly activation rates, well, no one wants to see that go down. But it's going to underperform on retention, and maybe most …”

“And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel and installs and signups barely move. They go down by like maybe five, 10%. I don't remember what it was and what did go down. It was all Low quality. So every marketing dollar that was being…”

“You know, we have grown organically until now. We haven't invested anything in paid acquisition, so not making it free was not really an option for us, you know.”

“Even, even if everyone you acquired Upgraded a 29 dollar a month plan. There is no, there are no ads anywhere on earth that you can make that, that LTV work.”

“In today's environment where like paid is pretty hard to get an edge on any sort of edge you have will generally get competed away by competitors coming into the market. You're looking to see that someone's not going to rely on paid or sales for everything unl…”

“And the challenge with paid is It always looks better yesterday than it does today, unless you have a network effect business where the product quality is getting better, faster than the quality of people you're bringing are getting worse, right? Cause you alw…”

“If you are doing PLG and you're doing paid acquisition, sub a hundred million in revenue, I'm not sure you're really PLG.”

“It's always been the highest quality channel for paid acquisition has been spending on ads in other email newsletters, because at least it is a behavior that someone already has.”

“We'd totally been burned on, on paid acquisition, and we pretty much made You know, a very firm rule that we weren't going to do paid acquisition. And so instead we said, we're going to take any money that we have and we're going to put it into content because…”

“I would treat this as paid acquisition, actually. You're spending money to acquire customers, and if you stop spending, those customers won't appear.”

“Paid is oversaturated in a lot of ways. I would say, though, that they're not, these things are not dead. They're dead as broad brush tools. Paid has channel, like, has specific niches where it works well. Push notifications have specific niches where they wor…”

“If other things work, it is highly likely that paid acquisition will work.”

“And I think there's some really great examples Of companies that have scaled, you know, in relatively recent times, almost exclusively through paid, like Grammarly is a really good example of this.”

“If I'm seeing things like that, and I'm seeing that you're converting, you know, seven, like five plus percent of your free users to a paid subscriber, then there is a big opportunity to play paid, right? And lean into kind of paid Paid growth loops and paid a…”

“SEO has a different a different return horizon than say paid acquisition, right? It's longer out. It's maybe six months is the earliest you can see results. And even then it's going to be a small trickle that compounds over time.”

“But even right now, during contraction, there are going to be some winners. The companies that had strong cash positions, had strong unit economics, strong payback periods already, right? Grammarly, Canva, to name two that I know personally, a couple of others…”

“So if paid acquisitions kind of working for you, that's often a really good use case for going with an agency or somebody who does it all the time because it changes so fast and so much, you know, right.”

“I think in the early days using paid users is actually cheating growth and you should avoid it as much as possible.”

“If paid acquisition is the only way that you are able to grow your company, then I'm gonna discount that channel of growth greatly. That is because if you actually get really popular, you can actually start being someone significant, Let's say becoming a hundr…”

“Paid paid acquisition through adverts also, also at some point hits the ceiling. And we are seeing, like you said, the space is competitive. So, so it will not be it will not work to grow only from cost per click forever.”

“And if you can get the unit economics anywhere near reasonable for paid acquisition, you should Probably put everything you can into that channel, knowing it's just a component of your overall strategy.”

“Most of the best businesses in the internet age of technology haven't spent a ton on paid acquisition.”

“So at scale, content is not at all how we get users today. But in the early days, or at least it's still some of the way we get users, but not the main source. Which is paid acquisition.”

“If there's a unique characteristic across the most successful portfolio companies we have, it's high repeat and a lack of dependence upon paid acquisition for a significant piece of your revenue.”

“Because of the pressures of just straight acquiring, like, paid acquisition is the pressures are so high on there, that's when you see things move more towards organic, because you're always trying to reduce the cost of customer acquisition.”

“Until like six months ago, I was under the impression that it is not possible to have a positive ROI on on paid acquisition. Cause I've never seen it in, this is my first, second company and I've never seen it work. And we we've tried external agencies. We've …”

“Paid acquisition, which is probably more like You know, 10% of our acquisition”