I've been inspired by @wired's 5 level series, in which experts explain what they're doing to a kid, a teenager, a college student, a grad student, and a fellow expert.

As an artistic exercise, I'm going to explain the idea of attribution in growth marketing the same way👇 7 y/o: Have you ever used a coupon to buy toys? Did you find it in a magazine? It tells the toy store which magazine you read - because they use different coupon codes for different magazines. Websites use codes too - to say where you came from. They call those codes UTM tags.

It's a misconception that paid ads only work short-term. I've seen tons of startups growing solely off paid ads. For years.

Yes, long-term, more companies will advertise on a platform, and it costs more to run an ad. But people overblow this.

More nuance below 👇 If you target audiences that don't naturally add new people every year, then yes, they get more expensive. (Audience saturates.)

But search ads (Google Ads, Bing, etc.) are almost always renewable audiences: people don't usually google the same thing twice. Especially in B2B.

1/ There are two types of successful stock pickers: arbitrageurs and value investors.

This happens to cross over to growth marketing. Growth hackers are arbitrageurs. Growth marketers are value investors.

Explanation and examples below 👇. 2/ Arbitrageurs exploit short-term supply/demand imbalances and "ride the wave."

Value investors find longer-term, profitable investments with a safely low price.