Hey Andrew, lots of valid points here. I’d push back on just one:
What you described as "Little Channels" are a hustle, not a growth strategy. They work while you're finding PMF or your first thousand true fans, but they rarely make a dent when it comes to scaling. Saying this from experience -- I’ve built consumer apps in ride-sharing/food delivery, payments, and app stores -- and have done the scrappy FB groups, cold emails, and IRL activations to get to PMF. But I can now wholeheartedly say that growing a user base to tens or hundreds of millions requires a different playbook.
I’d offer differentiated content and brand as the sustainable way forward. And while I agree that Product is King for retention, it’s content and brand, given they speak to your demographic, that become the sustainable drivers of long-term growth. Don’t take it the wrong way -- loved the writeup overall!
Sigh. I wish people who commented on essays would read. Let me quote you the sentences you're missing: "Don’t worry about scaling. Let’s say you have a new product with only 100 active users. If your marketing campaign gets you +500 actives, you’re ecstatic. Gain a few hundred users inside an established company, and you should clean up your resume." And then I go on to discuss at length the tradeoffs that startups can make when they are pre-scale. "Try reaching people in new ways, say novel things to people they haven’t yet heard, and if you have to trade off anything, just trade off scalability. (You can deal with that later once your product is successful even at a small scale)"
Why take the time to comment instead of just reading the whole thing through?
@Andrew, The impression I got from the comment is that he did read but just disagrees. Specifically, I'm reading it as "Little Channels" are not worth it from Fahad and you (Andrew) are saying they are. You are okay with the scalability trade-off knowing it will still help you get there whereas Fahad is saying it "requires a different playbook".
@Fahad, if I did understand that correctly, then I would be curious why you feel it requires a different playbook and that the tradeoffs aren't worth it.
@Andrew, it sounds like there is a separate claim being made that it's not just product but product + brand. Would you agree with this and/or do you think it's heavily skewed Product > Brand?
Fahad, I'm trying to understand what you wrote, but it seems you really don't have a firm grasp of what 'brand' really is. It is not a marketing strategy/tactic, it is a customer's experience multiplied over the number of customers. You don't create 'brand', customers do. You are just creating marketing to drive customers to have the experience that in turns creates 'brand.'
By the way, those verticals you cite? They all started in one market and their success in doing "what doesn't scale" enabled them to scale.
Hey Lydia - totally agree that brand is shaped by customer experience -- but it’s not some passive outcome.
The best companies intentionally design for it. You don’t “create” brand out of thin air, but you do craft the signals that influence how it’s perceived: tone, voice, reputation, product UX, content, and community all play a role. That’s what I meant by using brand and content as strategic levers for long-term growth, not as surface-level tactics.
And yes, doing things that don’t scale is table stakes. I’ve done it. I just see a lot of founders mistake those early moves for a growth strategy, when they’re really just the ignition
I’ve created plenty of brands out of thin air actually (one of them… ironically called “out of thin air” believe it or not). The more substantive point being that of course some brands are “invented” and very specifically designed and curated to create a certain experience.
Of course businesses “create” brand… (sure you could argue that customers “own it”) some do it better than others and some sort of “allow it to happen”. But anyone doing brand well has thought about it and crafted it very carefully indeed.
Totally agree with the overall sentiment — most mainstream marketing channels feel saturated or underperforming right now. But I think it's also important to recognize the blind spots that still exist within specific industries.
For example, influencers are heavily overexposed in consumer-facing markets — fashion, beauty, wellness, etc. But in more traditional or overlooked sectors, like older-school manufacturing or B2B niche services, there's still massive distrust and untapped potential. In some of those verticals, no one has even tried modern influencer or creator strategies yet — which can make them surprisingly effective.
So while the common channels might feel not effective at scale, they can still be goldmines when applied creatively in the right (under-marketed) places.
yup -- I agree that being creative is the key, and that pockets of inefficiency exist! Of course they do. I especially like your point about twists on existing big channels, like influencers + niche B2B.
Long-term partnerships with creators are also overlooked.
Creators should be given equity that vests and some contract for long-term marketing. It's like hiring a marketing guy that doesn't suck (so many do, esp in b2b it's unreal) and you buy their whole audience for free. With aligned incentives, I'm not sure the creator route ends up as that expensive. You can use the deal to help amplify your organic channel growth too
As a B2C founder just crossing $500k revenue across hardware and software, this was a cathartic read! We've pretty much explored all the channels listed, done pretty well, but I have recently come to the same realization that the little channels can punch above their weight. For example, we make AR glasses to replace bike computers. Instead of going B2C through ads and trying to pitch big retailers, I've found it valuable so far to just go to local bike shops and chat. Notwithstanding you learn a lot, if they like you enough they can sign a LOI which helps validate the business. 💪
I have come to this conclusion also. I tried every traditional growth strategy and algos and companies change so much it's pointless to do a deep dive into any one area. I still do them but I don't optimize a lot. I just have a lot of eggs in different baskets. I am also looking into unconventional ways to market my satire news.
Your law of shitty click throughs is correct and I've lived it through paid search, dynamic retargeting, LinkedIn and other channels. Which is why the marketing channel I've been successfully using and which has no upper bounds for B2B startups is one that I will only ever share with people who pay me to share it.
The law of unshitty click throughs: don't tell anyone your secrets.
so true; we see that a lot of companies we worked with struggle with each acquisition channel and capitalizing on the one that worked for a while before.
Great insights, Andrew! Totally agree—achieving success today is a lot harder and demands serious out-of-the-box thinking, along with a rock-solid product-market fit. I definitely miss the days when PPC could practically carry growth on its own.
If theory holds, there should be (now little) channel like what PPC was back in the days (compared to large channels in that era), which are still underused. That's the exact reason why PPC worked so well, large enterprises were overlooking it.
One channel I can think of is piggy-back riding off ChatGPT's back, or any other similar LLM chat apps for that sake. The other month I was talking to a CEO of one unicorn cloud computing company, who said they doubled number of daily deploys utilising ChatGPTs add-ons marketplace, spurring growth after years of inefficient pushes through other channels.
Great article btw, like any from Andrew Chen's pen.
That will always be the case if you start with the marketing channel to solve the problem (and I know you aren't suggesting that). Here's a decent order: customer clarity + prioritization - problem they care about - solution product/service provides - differentiated value (logical/emotional) - message + channel + cultural moment + hard work to test/iterate
Came here to say something similar - as a former CMO with 25 years in digital marketing, the tendency of companies to look only at channels/tactics is myopic at best. You must not skip: strategic planning, integrated approach to everything from messaging to timing across channels, test/adapt on creative/messaging, etc. And bottom line is CONSISTENCY and VISIBILITY, which helps turn awareness into trust.
It’s always been the case that upstarts have needed to find new wedges to grow—if nothing else, some existent channels were too expensive without already large scale.
I do agree with the current state of affairs though. Definitely there’s no go-to for growth hackers and it’s all a bit of a munge. Here’s to seeing what comes next!
Well, re: "upstarts have needed to find new wedges to grow" -- I would argue that at the very beginning of a new platform like mobile, upstarts could just throw money into ads and it would just work. A lot of this is driven by the channels being 10+ years old.
Well, growth hackers have always found weird tricks to grind growth out. But yeah, true enough—no magic bullets today like SEO was at one point, or FB ads, or Instagram, etc. (as you mention)
My group has a thesis for what comes next. We are an early stage company ourselves, in digital infrastructure, and are actively seeking the involvement of partners to get this side of it to market. Hit me up if you would like to explore some ideas.
Hey Andrew, I have been wondering about the same. We do not have any product available similar to MNTN for creators and brand collaboration. I built a review platform where users can provide reviews to creators and was looking for few ideas to work on to expand the platform to a better suited product. Looks like I found one.
BTW, you can check the current review platform here: ratecreator.com
Good points Andrew, but here is the REAL problem. Marketing is a science. Physical availability and mental availability. If you don’t understand the science behind marketing, you will fail. This is just as important as having a technical cofounder. Read “How Brands Grow” and learn the actual science behind how to grow revenue and acquire customers.
Something works. Likely a strategy custom designed to reach the target audience with the right message and the right offer. There has never been a magic solution. Growth takes work. Hard work. You need people obsessed with getting it right. Willing to figure it out and most importantly willing to do the hard work.
I couldn’t agree more. This AI era has taken too much bandwidth from customers—they don’t buy from the best, they buy from what they know. That’s why so many founders build in public. All channels are hit or miss, with only the occasional payoff. That’s why I’m building an AI agent to automate the influencer marketing workflow—to help people save time and try more.
Hey Andrew, lots of valid points here. I’d push back on just one:
What you described as "Little Channels" are a hustle, not a growth strategy. They work while you're finding PMF or your first thousand true fans, but they rarely make a dent when it comes to scaling. Saying this from experience -- I’ve built consumer apps in ride-sharing/food delivery, payments, and app stores -- and have done the scrappy FB groups, cold emails, and IRL activations to get to PMF. But I can now wholeheartedly say that growing a user base to tens or hundreds of millions requires a different playbook.
I’d offer differentiated content and brand as the sustainable way forward. And while I agree that Product is King for retention, it’s content and brand, given they speak to your demographic, that become the sustainable drivers of long-term growth. Don’t take it the wrong way -- loved the writeup overall!
Sigh. I wish people who commented on essays would read. Let me quote you the sentences you're missing: "Don’t worry about scaling. Let’s say you have a new product with only 100 active users. If your marketing campaign gets you +500 actives, you’re ecstatic. Gain a few hundred users inside an established company, and you should clean up your resume." And then I go on to discuss at length the tradeoffs that startups can make when they are pre-scale. "Try reaching people in new ways, say novel things to people they haven’t yet heard, and if you have to trade off anything, just trade off scalability. (You can deal with that later once your product is successful even at a small scale)"
Why take the time to comment instead of just reading the whole thing through?
@Andrew, The impression I got from the comment is that he did read but just disagrees. Specifically, I'm reading it as "Little Channels" are not worth it from Fahad and you (Andrew) are saying they are. You are okay with the scalability trade-off knowing it will still help you get there whereas Fahad is saying it "requires a different playbook".
@Fahad, if I did understand that correctly, then I would be curious why you feel it requires a different playbook and that the tradeoffs aren't worth it.
@Andrew, it sounds like there is a separate claim being made that it's not just product but product + brand. Would you agree with this and/or do you think it's heavily skewed Product > Brand?
You're quoting a post-scale playbook. And it sucks. It's post-scale.
Pre-scale, you do stuff that doesn't scale, which also sucks, mainly in terms of your effort and your lack of a life doing it. But it works.
Really like this perspective, Fahad.
Fahad, I'm trying to understand what you wrote, but it seems you really don't have a firm grasp of what 'brand' really is. It is not a marketing strategy/tactic, it is a customer's experience multiplied over the number of customers. You don't create 'brand', customers do. You are just creating marketing to drive customers to have the experience that in turns creates 'brand.'
By the way, those verticals you cite? They all started in one market and their success in doing "what doesn't scale" enabled them to scale.
Hey Lydia - totally agree that brand is shaped by customer experience -- but it’s not some passive outcome.
The best companies intentionally design for it. You don’t “create” brand out of thin air, but you do craft the signals that influence how it’s perceived: tone, voice, reputation, product UX, content, and community all play a role. That’s what I meant by using brand and content as strategic levers for long-term growth, not as surface-level tactics.
And yes, doing things that don’t scale is table stakes. I’ve done it. I just see a lot of founders mistake those early moves for a growth strategy, when they’re really just the ignition
Appreciate the back and forth
I’ve created plenty of brands out of thin air actually (one of them… ironically called “out of thin air” believe it or not). The more substantive point being that of course some brands are “invented” and very specifically designed and curated to create a certain experience.
Of course businesses “create” brand… (sure you could argue that customers “own it”) some do it better than others and some sort of “allow it to happen”. But anyone doing brand well has thought about it and crafted it very carefully indeed.
Totally agree with the overall sentiment — most mainstream marketing channels feel saturated or underperforming right now. But I think it's also important to recognize the blind spots that still exist within specific industries.
For example, influencers are heavily overexposed in consumer-facing markets — fashion, beauty, wellness, etc. But in more traditional or overlooked sectors, like older-school manufacturing or B2B niche services, there's still massive distrust and untapped potential. In some of those verticals, no one has even tried modern influencer or creator strategies yet — which can make them surprisingly effective.
So while the common channels might feel not effective at scale, they can still be goldmines when applied creatively in the right (under-marketed) places.
yup -- I agree that being creative is the key, and that pockets of inefficiency exist! Of course they do. I especially like your point about twists on existing big channels, like influencers + niche B2B.
Long-term partnerships with creators are also overlooked.
Creators should be given equity that vests and some contract for long-term marketing. It's like hiring a marketing guy that doesn't suck (so many do, esp in b2b it's unreal) and you buy their whole audience for free. With aligned incentives, I'm not sure the creator route ends up as that expensive. You can use the deal to help amplify your organic channel growth too
As a B2C founder just crossing $500k revenue across hardware and software, this was a cathartic read! We've pretty much explored all the channels listed, done pretty well, but I have recently come to the same realization that the little channels can punch above their weight. For example, we make AR glasses to replace bike computers. Instead of going B2C through ads and trying to pitch big retailers, I've found it valuable so far to just go to local bike shops and chat. Notwithstanding you learn a lot, if they like you enough they can sign a LOI which helps validate the business. 💪
I have come to this conclusion also. I tried every traditional growth strategy and algos and companies change so much it's pointless to do a deep dive into any one area. I still do them but I don't optimize a lot. I just have a lot of eggs in different baskets. I am also looking into unconventional ways to market my satire news.
Your law of shitty click throughs is correct and I've lived it through paid search, dynamic retargeting, LinkedIn and other channels. Which is why the marketing channel I've been successfully using and which has no upper bounds for B2B startups is one that I will only ever share with people who pay me to share it.
The law of unshitty click throughs: don't tell anyone your secrets.
haha this is the real truth.
so true; we see that a lot of companies we worked with struggle with each acquisition channel and capitalizing on the one that worked for a while before.
Great insights, Andrew! Totally agree—achieving success today is a lot harder and demands serious out-of-the-box thinking, along with a rock-solid product-market fit. I definitely miss the days when PPC could practically carry growth on its own.
If theory holds, there should be (now little) channel like what PPC was back in the days (compared to large channels in that era), which are still underused. That's the exact reason why PPC worked so well, large enterprises were overlooking it.
One channel I can think of is piggy-back riding off ChatGPT's back, or any other similar LLM chat apps for that sake. The other month I was talking to a CEO of one unicorn cloud computing company, who said they doubled number of daily deploys utilising ChatGPTs add-ons marketplace, spurring growth after years of inefficient pushes through other channels.
Great article btw, like any from Andrew Chen's pen.
That will always be the case if you start with the marketing channel to solve the problem (and I know you aren't suggesting that). Here's a decent order: customer clarity + prioritization - problem they care about - solution product/service provides - differentiated value (logical/emotional) - message + channel + cultural moment + hard work to test/iterate
Came here to say something similar - as a former CMO with 25 years in digital marketing, the tendency of companies to look only at channels/tactics is myopic at best. You must not skip: strategic planning, integrated approach to everything from messaging to timing across channels, test/adapt on creative/messaging, etc. And bottom line is CONSISTENCY and VISIBILITY, which helps turn awareness into trust.
It’s always been the case that upstarts have needed to find new wedges to grow—if nothing else, some existent channels were too expensive without already large scale.
I do agree with the current state of affairs though. Definitely there’s no go-to for growth hackers and it’s all a bit of a munge. Here’s to seeing what comes next!
Well, re: "upstarts have needed to find new wedges to grow" -- I would argue that at the very beginning of a new platform like mobile, upstarts could just throw money into ads and it would just work. A lot of this is driven by the channels being 10+ years old.
Well, growth hackers have always found weird tricks to grind growth out. But yeah, true enough—no magic bullets today like SEO was at one point, or FB ads, or Instagram, etc. (as you mention)
My group has a thesis for what comes next. We are an early stage company ourselves, in digital infrastructure, and are actively seeking the involvement of partners to get this side of it to market. Hit me up if you would like to explore some ideas.
https://calendly.com/scott-phillips-vaulted-ventures
Hey Andrew, I have been wondering about the same. We do not have any product available similar to MNTN for creators and brand collaboration. I built a review platform where users can provide reviews to creators and was looking for few ideas to work on to expand the platform to a better suited product. Looks like I found one.
BTW, you can check the current review platform here: ratecreator.com
Could you list some examples of small channels?
It's in the essay.
Good points Andrew, but here is the REAL problem. Marketing is a science. Physical availability and mental availability. If you don’t understand the science behind marketing, you will fail. This is just as important as having a technical cofounder. Read “How Brands Grow” and learn the actual science behind how to grow revenue and acquire customers.
For example, here are some assumptions you make and the science behind what you say.
1. Marketing tactics decay over time
Partially true.
Yes, tactics decay — but brands don’t grow because of novel tactics; they grow from reach, distinctiveness, and availability.
2. Early movers win, late adopters get less CTR
Tactically, yes
But CTR isn’t the goal — brand salience and availability are. Chasing novelty can hurt brand consistency.
3. You always need new channels
Wrong frame
You need mass reach across many channels, not constant novelty. Focus on reach, not novelty.
4. Scale hurts performance
Misleading
As scale grows, expected CTRs drop due to hitting light buyers. That’s not a bug — it’s growth.
This insight touches primary market research as well since it is a by-product of the growth channel work. What else have you seen in that regard?
Something works. Likely a strategy custom designed to reach the target audience with the right message and the right offer. There has never been a magic solution. Growth takes work. Hard work. You need people obsessed with getting it right. Willing to figure it out and most importantly willing to do the hard work.
I couldn’t agree more. This AI era has taken too much bandwidth from customers—they don’t buy from the best, they buy from what they know. That’s why so many founders build in public. All channels are hit or miss, with only the occasional payoff. That’s why I’m building an AI agent to automate the influencer marketing workflow—to help people save time and try more.
It’s SaaS all the way down: Software as a Service marketed by a deluge of content enabled by Slop as a Service