Fix conversion before scaling acquisition

Customer acquisition is so hard that if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetizing people, you're going to really struggle on the customer acquisition side.

Don't invest until you have word of mouth. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll solve other problems by just starting to ramp up a performance marketing program. Just get the word of mouth piece first, so that you're coming into this program with some tailwinds and then start ramping it up.

If what your plan is is to use paid acquisition on top of a freemium model to get a percentage of people to convert, and hopefully, stick around forever, I'd pivot right now. I cannot see it working.

Even if you have a low CAC, I was just talking to an entrepreneur this morning, he was like, 'Oh, we were able to hit a 10-cent CAC.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, but that grows.' As you start targeting more people, the low hanging fruit dry out, and you end up having to pay more money.

You don't want your product to be at a point where more than 50% of your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition. I think if that is happening, your core growth engine is broken.

A good metric is that 40 to 50% of your new customers should ideally come from organic channels and 50% from paid. If 90% come from paid, that means at some point that the music is going to stop.