By Julian Shapiro (Twitter, Website, LinkedIn)

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What are the most effective ways to acquire customers in 2021?

Channels may include:

Google Search • Instagram • Facebook • Quora • Amazon • Google Display • App Store • Pinterest • Snapchat • YouTube • Bing • LinkedIn • Affiliates • Influencers • Direct mail • Physical ads • SEO • UGC • Share-worthy content • Network effects • Referrals • Sales • Content aggregators • Speaking and events • PR • TV/print/radio • Community

(I summarize most of these at the bottom of this doc.)

At my startup, Demand Curve, we’ve trained 1,000+ companies in growth. And we have a community of 50,000+. So, I see a lot of marketing data.

Let’s narrow into two critical trends I’m seeing.

Part 1. When should you scale new channels?

Until you’ve proven strong NPS and retention, you’re not ready to scale. Until then, the purpose of customer acquisition is getting a sample audience of users to test your ideas on and gather feedback from.

If you scale growth before then, bad first impressions can ruin you and be impossible to come back from in a competitive market. This is real. As a senior PM from Facebook, Nikita Bier, puts it: “If you need to launch nationwide to test your product, it's not a good test. You will prematurely exhaust your audience's attention and limit future shots.”

Therefore, when growing a startup, I use a sequence like this:

  1. Fix every major drop-off point in your product funnel. Plug holes.
  2. Next, maximize retention and NPS within reason. Make sure people are happy and stay.
  3. Then scale up customer acquisition. Start with the channels you have high conviction in.

Part 2. Which channel is best?

The best channel is… whichever works 😂

But, generally, product-led acquisition (PLA) is the best growth channel. Product-led acquisition is when your users drive your growth for you—by inviting others in one way or another. Like when you join Slack then you invite your teammates and partner organizations.

(Note: People often use product-led growth to mean having leads skip sales demos and instead self-serve their registration via an open demo or trial, and so I have to call this PLA instead of PLG because they ruined the term for us. Since that process should be called product-led sales, not product-led growth!)

PLA is the best because it scales without increasing costs, you’re not at the mercy of third-party platforms (Facebook ad costs, Google SEO rankings), it has compounding/network effects (new users invite more users), and it’s defensible (no one can take it away from you).