Startups
Growth you buy stops when you do
Every channel works given enough time. The only question is whether you have that much runway
The only channel question that matters
Pick against the calendar you have, not the one you hope for
Paid channels return quickly and stop the day the card gets declined. Content, SEO and community compound and look like pure cost for months — which is entirely fine with eighteen months of runway and reckless with seven.
That’s the whole decision, and it usually gets made on fashion instead. A seed-stage company copying the content strategy of a company three rounds ahead is copying a plan that assumes runway it doesn’t have.
The uncomfortable version: if your runway is short, the patient channels aren’t available to you yet, and pretending otherwise is how a marketing budget becomes a post-mortem slide.
Before you scale anything
Buying growth you can’t keep is worse than no growth
Paid channels will happily convert money into signups that churn in month two, and the chart looks like progress the entire time
Cohort retention first
Until the curve stops falling, extra budget doesn’t compound — it just refills. Hold spend flat while you find out.
Then payback period
If you can’t say how long it takes to earn back the cost of a customer, increasing spend doesn’t accelerate the business. It accelerates the burn.
Then source, honestly
Add a free-text “how did you hear about us?” field early. At low volumes it beats every analytics platform you could install.
Why retention is existential rather than financial at this stage
Reichheld’s research at Bain & Company found that a 5% improvement in customer retention increased profits by 25–95% depending on industry. For an established business that’s a margin story. For a startup it’s a survival one.
A company that retains doesn’t have to keep buying next month’s revenue. A company that doesn’t retain has to raise again just to stand still — and it will be raising on a growth chart that a competent investor can read the shape of.
Source — Reichheld, F., Bain & Company, via Harvard Business Review, “The Value of Keeping the Right Customers,” 2014.
Positioning
You don’t need a brand. You need a sentence
Startups routinely commission a visual identity while the homepage still can’t explain what the product does. A logo and a palette solve nothing when a visitor leaves unsure what they just read about.
What you need is a sentence a stranger can repeat accurately after reading it once. That’s a higher bar than it sounds, and it’s the bar that determines whether anyone tells anyone else about you.
The advantage you hold over larger competitors is narrowness. They have to appeal broadly, so their message is necessarily general. You can name one specific customer with one specific problem and be unmistakably right for them. That trade is available to you and not to them.
How we run it
The startup playbook
01
Get the sentence right firstOne customer, one problem, one outcome, in language a stranger repeats accurately. Nothing downstream works until this does, and no agency can do it for you alone.
02
Choose channels against runwayPayback period versus months of cash. Patient channels are a luxury purchase; know whether you can afford one before you commit a team to it.
03
Instrument retention before acquisitionCohort curves and a self-reported source field. Both are cheap, both are more informative than a dashboard at this volume.
04
Put the founder in frontHighest-return channel available at this stage and it costs no media budget. It also gives you the fastest read on which sentence actually lands.
05
Compete on narrownessBe unmistakably right for one kind of customer rather than vaguely acceptable to everyone. It’s the one advantage a bigger competitor structurally can’t copy.
06
Only then scale spendWhen payback is known and retention has stopped falling. Before that, more budget buys a steeper chart and the same underlying problem.
What we run for early-stage companies
Where the leverage is
Website & positioning
A site that explains the product in one readable sentence and gets out of the way. Usually the fastest measurable win available.
Conversion optimization
At low traffic volumes, improving conversion is far cheaper than buying more visitors — and it makes every later channel work harder.
Measurement setup
Cohort retention, payback period and self-reported source, built early enough to actually inform a decision.
Corunit CRM
Pipeline and follow-up that don’t depend on a founder remembering. Cheap now, indispensable at thirty customers.
Paid search
For capturing demand that already exists, sized against payback rather than against ambition.
SEO groundwork
Started early because it compounds slowly — the one channel where the cost of waiting is highest.
Good questions
Startup marketing, answered
Not sure whether your growth is compounding or leaking? That’s a cohort chart, and it takes about an hour to build.
Which channel should a startup begin with?
The one whose payback period fits inside your runway. That’s the entire decision, and it usually gets made on fashion instead. Paid channels return quickly and stop the day you stop paying. Content, SEO and community compound and look like pure cost for months — fine with eighteen months of runway, reckless with seven. Pick against the calendar you actually have, not the one you hope to have after the next round.
How much should we spend on marketing before product-market fit?
Very little, and mostly on finding out what’s true. Spending on acquisition before you know whether people stay is how startups convert money into a growth chart that collapses the moment budget stops. Paid channels will happily supply signups that churn in month two while the dashboard reads as progress. Until cohort retention stabilises, marketing money is better spent learning than scaling.
Why does retention matter so much at this stage?
Because it determines whether growth compounds or leaks. Reichheld’s research at Bain found a 5% improvement in retention increased profits by 25–95% depending on industry. For an early-stage company the effect is more existential than financial: a business that retains doesn’t need to keep buying its next month of revenue, and one that doesn’t has to raise again to stand still.
Do we need a brand before we have customers?
You need clarity, which is different from brand. A logo and a colour palette solve nothing at this stage. What you need is a sentence a stranger can repeat accurately after reading it once, because the first job is being understood rather than being admired. Startups routinely spend on visual identity while the homepage still can’t explain what the product does.
Is founder-led marketing worth the time?
For most early-stage companies it’s the highest-return channel available, and it costs no media budget. People follow people, and a founder who explains what they’re building and what they’re learning accumulates an audience a company account can’t. It also produces the fastest feedback on positioning, because the reactions tell you which sentence lands before you spend anything testing it.
When should we hire an agency versus in-house?
Bring in outside help for work that’s specialised, occasional or needs to start well; hire in-house for work that must happen every week forever. A first marketing hire who owns the ongoing rhythm, supported on specialist channels, generally beats either extreme. The failure mode is outsourcing your positioning — the one thing nobody outside the company can get right for you.
How do we compete against much bigger budgets?
By being narrower than they can afford to be. A large competitor has to appeal broadly, which means their message is necessarily general. You can name one specific customer with one specific problem and be unmistakably right for them. That trade is available to you and not to them — and it works far better than trying to say the same thing more cheaply.
What should we measure in the first year?
Cohort retention, payback period, and where customers actually came from — in that order. Traffic and follower counts are the numbers most likely to be reported and least likely to matter. Add a free-text “how did you hear about us?” field to your signup form early; at low volumes it’ll tell you more about what’s working than any analytics platform.
When is it safe to scale spend?
When you can state the payback period with a straight face and cohort retention has stopped falling. If you can’t say how long it takes to earn back the cost of acquiring a customer, increasing spend doesn’t accelerate the business — it accelerates the burn. Holding budget flat until those two numbers are stable is the difference between growth and an expensive chart.
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