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independence3 unconnected
standing

contested · 4 claims against 2

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

high

evidence

6 claims · 4 articles · 4 receipts

window

2017-01-17 → 2020-07-20

3 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Treat paid as a job, not a switch you flip

One builder aimed for an acquisition cost of zero rather than a healthy ratio, on the grounds that the spend-to-grow rule assumes investors behind you, and reports that every strategy built on buying customers burned a few hundred dollars plus dozens of his hours for nothing. A business too small to justify somebody whose job this is should not expect the channel to work, and anyone wanting a business that runs without them should leave it alone, because staying profitable means constant new variants. The opposing view is that most of those failures are cheap setup errors: never write off a platform on poor results alone, and pausing is only honest once the mundane mistakes have been ruled out.

Where this splits

Two builders conclude a small bootstrapped business should stay out of paid entirely, while a paid specialist holds that undiagnosed failure is not evidence the channel does not work.

  1. side 01 · 4 claims

    A small bootstrapped business should stay out of paid

    Jakob Greenfeld · Tyler Tringas

    1. 1Aim for an acquisition cost of nothing at all rather than for a healthy ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, because the spend-to-grow logic assumes investor money behind you.
    2. 2Every strategy built on purchasing customers burned a few hundred dollars plus dozens of the author's hours and produced nothing, so treat paid channels as not worth the frustration at this stage.
    3. 3Paid advertising needs someone whose job it is, so a business too small to justify that role should not expect the channel to work for it at all.
    4. 4Leave paid ads alone if you want a business that runs without you, since keeping them profitable means constantly testing new variants and watching whether they earn back more than they cost.

  2. side 02 · 2 claims

    Diagnose the failure before writing off the ad platform

    Greg Kogan

    1. 1Never write off an ad platform on poor results alone; find out why it underperformed before concluding the channel does not work for you, and distrust anyone who declares a platform useless without a diagnosis.
    2. 2It is fine to pause a paid channel until you have resources to experiment properly, but only after ruling out the cheap-to-fix setup errors as the cause.

What it returned

  • 90%

    He responds to an article claiming traffic from Google and Facebook ads is 90% useless because 9 of 10 ad visitors barely interacted with the site.

  • The usual rule of thumb is to spend freely once lifetime value is roughly three times acquisition cost

  • He names time wasted on Adwords, Facebook ads and Twitter ads specifically

  • Storemapper never seriously used Facebook or Adwords because it was not big enough to warrant a full-time person managing them, whereas a larger owner can spread a skilled marketer's cost across more revenue

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 ads

all ads plays

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.