Organic growth vs Paid growth

Hey Builders!

When growing a business, one of the toughest decisions a founder has to make is whether to grow it organically or using paid channels.

I am growing Tweet Hunter, Taplio, and now Typeframes using both. We hope to hit $10M ARR this year.

For organic: I have a 150,000 audience and over 20,000 SEO backlinks.
For paid: We spend over $30,000 every month on ads and collaborations.

Here is how YOU should think about this and maximize your long-term revenue:

Short answer: delay paid growth as much as you can.

Long answer: read ahead 👇🏻👇🏻

When I started…

When building my first few products, I was super happy to spend money on paid growth from the beginning.

I mean think about it:

You spend $1000 → You get 200 leads → 20 of them convert to a $29/mo plan

You gain back your money in 2 months + have 180 people to sell your product to.

What could possibly go wrong? right?

I soon realized that everything could go wrong.

• Low retention

• No brand value

• No network effect

Which means… you are always running a cashflow negative business, chasing imaginary $$$ numbers on your stripe dashboard.

I lost a lot of my money this way on products not validated by the market and eventually had to shut them down/take huge losses on the ad spend.

And it all arises from 1 root cause:

The problem with paid growth

Don’t get me wrong — I love paid growth.

Amazing RoI, super easy to set up, and live feedback on your campaigns.

But the benefit is also the problem with paid growth: it’s too easy to set up.

Making it extremely attractive for builders to spend money on it — giving them false positives about their business validation.

The long-term edge

I see organic growth mainly around social media and SEO.

Social media for people who know you.
SEO for people who don’t know you.

And the growth process there is slow, and takes time to show results.

This exactly will become your long-term advantage over your competition.

Anyone with sufficient funding can outspend you in paid growth. But no one can beat a 3-year old social media and SEO network overnight.

Most people don’t play difficult games. And that’s exactly why you should.

Bottom line: I recommend you build the product and grow organically for as long as possible. Get business validation from real customers and only then ramp up the growth with paid channels.

Eventually, you will maximize growth with both organic and paid, but it starts with organic.

I would love to know about your experience with paid growth channels.
Reply to this email and let me know! ⚡

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Tibo 💻