Thread by @GrowthTactics

Myth: Startups need multiple acquisition channels to grow.

Reality: You only need ONE profitable channel to begin traction.

THREAD: Learn how we think about channels (paid and unpaid)

Before we dive into paid channels, let's cover the distinction between behavior- and profile- targeting channels 👇

There are the 2 types of ad targeting:

Behavior: Serves ads to people searching for your product. Googling "tennis shoes" serves tennis shoe ads.

Profile: Uses profiles/engagement to serve ads. Someone who "likes" interior design photos on Instagram sees Wayfair ads.

Use behavior-targeting channels (E.g. Google ads) to capture inherent demand: If you sell dog food, run ads on searches like "best dog food"

Use profile-targeting channels (E.g. Instagram ads) for product discovery. Run ads to dog owners to help them *discover* your product

Beware of ad saturation while using profile-targeting channels.

No matter how many users are on Facebook, YouTube, etc., selling to a very niche subset risks overwhelming them with your ads.

Your audience will begin ignoring them. Click-through drops & acquisition cost rises.

You can avoid profile-targeting saturation by suppressing daily ad spend.

E.g. Put a cap on your ad frequency to avoid fatigue.

Trade short-term volume for long-term affordability.

In order to get paid acquisition to work for your startup, consider these 3 factors:

1. Cost: Is your margin high enough to sustain the channel's cost?
2. Audience Fit: Does it offer the right targeting to reach your audience?
3. Volume: Can you consistently reach that audience?

The greater your margin, the easier it is to get ads working. The most reliably performant channels:

• Facebook and Instagram
• Google Ads

If you can't get ads to run profitably, consider unpaid channels like SEO and content marketing.

Startups should prioritize unpaid channels if they have longer time horizons, or if they can't get the margins of paid to work.

Paid channels scale quickly, while unpaid channels need time to build momentum.

E.g. Consistent blogs can lead to long-term traffic.

Unpaid channels fall into one of two buckets:

1. Persistence: Grows through consistency. (SEO, Twitter, YouTube)
2. Hit-or-miss: Focused on achieving virality. (Reddit, Product Hunt, Hacker News)

Prioritize the first. Persistence channels offer compounding returns.

But hit-or-miss channels are still valuable—use them as accelerators:

Cross-post content to these channels for a better chance of occasionally going viral.

To figure out which channel to start with, rate each from 1-10 with the ICE framework:

• The *Impact* this channel may have, if successful
• Your *Confidence* it will succeed
• The *Ease* of trying it

Rank channels based on their average scores; highest is top priority

Recap:

• Use this thread to figure out which acquisition channel you should prioritize for your startup.
• Run growth experiments until you find 2-3 channels that work.
• Then focus on optimizing them.

If you're looking to learn more about paid, see our thread on ad channels:

https://twitter.com/GrowthTactics/status/1351571369935433731

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