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independence5 unconnected · 3 more authors in those circles
applies to

b2b, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

high

evidence

8 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2015-10-21 → 2024-12-20

5 builders who never spoke to each other

Go deeper on whatever brought the first customers

In the first year, keep working the handful of places your earliest buyers actually came from instead of opening new fronts, and only add a channel once the existing one is reliably producing. What transfers between businesses is not the channel but the cycle time, so run the experiments faster, and treat every route as expiring: a growth loop inside one platform will not carry to the next product, and a personal brand stops sourcing customers as you scale.

The method

  1. 01

    For acquisition in year one, go deeper on the handful of channels that produced your very first customers instead of opening new ones.

  2. 02

    The transferable lesson is not the specific channel but the cycle time: run acquisition experiments faster until one works for you.

  3. 03

    A growth loop that works inside one platform does not carry over to a product outside it; the next product needed a different acquisition plan entirely.

  4. 04

    A personal brand and podcast guest spots can start a business but will not keep sourcing customers as it scales. Kahl found this at Podscan after six months and had to add a second acquisition channel.

  5. 05

    Run growth as a portfolio of bets whose upside is at least ten times their cost, and budget for most of them failing, rather than a plan where everything must go right.

What it returned

  • Storemapper's year one consisted of continuing to post in e-commerce forums and to work through freelance job listings

  • It took him over a year of failed approaches before writing worked.

  • Podscan ran on personal brand and podcast appearances for its first six months, which jumpstarted the business but would not reliably source new customers and revenue

  • Amazon's Kindle lost money for years and the Fire Phone flopped; Bezos handed the Kindle to the executive running the physical book business and told him to destroy his own business with it.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in other

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.