I am starting to learn more about customer acquisition and growth marketing, and I LOVE it. Here are knowledge nuggets I’ve picked up:
1. It’s a 5-stage funnel: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.
2. Find your “Northern Star”. This metric should align with customer activation, not acquisition.
3. A large part of growth is determining how to gain a customer acquisition advantage.
4. There are three ways to gain an advantage: explore new brand strategies, explore new tactics with the same strategy, do it faster/better.
5. Start with market then product. There isn’t just product-market fit. The other 3: model-market, product-channel, channel-model. Don’t treat fits in silos.
6. Be the best at getting better. Channels, competitors, and audience needs are dynamic. Hypothesize, experiment, learn, iterate.
7. Your market and the # of customers influences your model (model-market). Find the ARPU (willingness to pay) and # of customers to hit your goal.
8. For channel-model fit: how much you charge and ARPU. Avoid “danger zone” on the ARPU/CAC spectrum, which leads to too much friction for low-cost CAC channels, and ARPUs too low to support higher channels.
9. Product-channel: products are built to fit channels, not vice versa.
Knowledge by Brain Balfour.
