How many top-of-funnel channels should a company invest in at once?

Harry Stebbings · Jan 18, 2023

When a founder has a channel that is already working, they should double down on it rather than diversifying into additional channels too early.

Scope: applies to the early days when one channel is already working

10:03 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Harry Stebbings · Feb 15, 2023

When an early-stage company has found a channel that works, diversifying is getting too cute too soon — they should pummel the working channel

Scope: stated as his own advice to teams, then tested against Mike

37:33 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023

Once a venture-scale company finds a channel that works it should concentrate its limited capital, talent and attention on fueling that one thing rather than diversifying channels

Diversification advice ignores the complexity that comes with running multiple products or channels; it is a money-manager's logic, not a business-growing logic

Scope: applies to venture-scale companies; endorses Kip Bodnar's framing

24:33 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Harry Stebbings · Jan 19, 2024 · hedged

The speaker advises founders that they do not need to be on every social channel — better to be on one and be great at it

21:22 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026

Startups should not spend on any ad platform other than Meta until they are spending $100,000 a month on Meta

Scope: threshold framed as $100k/month in Meta spend

0:00 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Roughly 90% of a company's growth comes from about 10% of the things it does, and this pattern repeats across successful startups

At PayPal five or six initiatives (eBay, referral bonuses, web developer engagement, shopping cart pre-integration, outbound sales) drove almost all growth while hundreds of millions went to campaigns and unused products; as a VC he saw the same pattern in other success stories

4:39 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Companies can't realistically double down on more than one or two growth loops at once, because doubling down means grinding through a hundred or more experiments

Moving return on ad spend from 0.5x to 3-4x takes a hundred experiments or more of tweaking and optimizing in the trenches

45:33 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

Most growth and marketing organizations are stretched too thin by investing in six different top-of-funnel channels; you should shut down everything except the two that demonstrably work

You can't be world class at everything — at New Relic organic content and performance marketing worked, and events and DevRel were done because people expect them, not because they returned value

Scope: channel selection is company-specific; the winning two at New Relic were organic content and performance marketing

7:31 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Harry Stebbings · Apr 5, 2023

You need one channel really humming to reach $50M in revenue and two channels to reach $100M

Scope: attributed to HubSpot's CMO

28:38 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox

Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023

According to Kit Bodnar of HubSpot, as cited by the interviewer, one channel working really well gets a company to $50M ARR and two channels working really well gets it to $100M ARR

24:11 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

Founders spreading across too many channels too early instead of nailing one channel efficiently is one of the biggest mistakes, and very few companies ever get even one channel truly working

22:13 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · May 30, 2025 · hedged

Companies can go too broad across channels too soon.

23:55 20Sales: From $2M ARR to $40M ARR: The Playbook | How to Use AI To Supercharge Your Sales Team | Why Pipeline Reviews are BS | The Sales Call Script that Closes 99% of Prospects and How to Hire the Best Sales Reps with Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Building a business maturely means running many channels at once — social, education, YouTube, Facebook ads, TikTok, Twitter, search, SEO — rather than accepting that 20% of sources drive 80% of outcomes

Multiplying channels reduces risk and lets you keep finding the next arbitrage

19:16 20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix

Andrew Dudum · Apr 4, 2026

Brand marketing only works if it is 'consistently random' — appearing in many different places in a randomized way but with sustained consistency and real dollars, because it takes roughly ten hits in ten different ways before a consumer registers cultural relevance and brand trust

Recognition and trust come from repeated multi-channel exposure, not a single memorable placement

Scope: requires a certain level of spend and multi-year commitment

33:25 20VC: Hims & Hers: $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue: The Comeback | Why Being Public is 10x Better | The Death of the "Strategy" Hire | Why Performance Marketing is Worse than Brand Marketing with Andrew Dudum

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Whether to be on every platform or just one should be decided by your brand truths and values, not as a general rule

Duolingo's own truth is 'Duo is everywhere,' so being on every platform is authentic for them; other brands should assess where they need to show up once they know their truths

21:39 Channel count follows brand truths

Harry Stebbings · Jan 19, 2024

A B2B SaaS product like a CFO platform should concentrate on one channel such as LinkedIn rather than being everywhere, whereas a mass-market product like language learning can be everywhere

Everyone can learn a language, so the addressable audience differs by product

22:40 Audience breadth determines channel count

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

The hardest part of paid is channel proliferation — you must avoid losing focus on channels where you won't learn much

There are too many channels to test and he's been burned spending on ones that yielded no learnings

38:15 Avoid channels that yield no learnings regardless of spend

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

Founders should double down hard on a working channel, but should still try a couple of channels at the very beginning to generate learnings, and figuring out just one of Facebook, Google or TikTok is usually enough because the learnings transfer.

Early experiments across channels teach you something even when they fail, and rules change constantly; meanwhile one large paid channel provides sufficient scale and transferable learning.

10:27 Try a few channels early for transferable learning then double down on one

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

HubSpot's ability to reach $50M ARR on one channel is not generalizable because almost no other company shares its market attributes

HubSpot has one of the biggest addressable markets in the world, sits in a near-oligopoly of fewer than five credible players, and CRM/marketing automation is a mandatory purchase

39:00 Hubspots one channel success is not generalizable due to unique market conditions

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Rather than only pummeling the one working channel, companies should progressively pressure-test the CAC and depth of every channel as they move through funding stages

Before raising a Series A or B you need to know with more than a hypothesis that you can actually deploy that money, and surprises in business are unacceptable

40:23 Progressively pressure test every channels cac and depth as funding stage advances

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Fear of burning out a channel is misplaced if you test on a small randomized sample — burning 1% of your addressable audience to learn the channel's true depth is worth it

A randomized small sample contains the damage while producing the learning; if you can't even take a sample, your market is too small and you should be doing ABM instead

42:16 Small randomized sample testing de risks fear of burning out a channel

Jeff Jordan · Jan 16, 2023

Founders shouldn't diversify acquisition channels too early, but as they scale they should experiment to reduce dependence on the two mega platforms

There is a point at which it pays to start experimenting, driven by the need to diversify away from dependence on Google and Facebook

32:56 Diversify channels only once scaled to reduce mega platform dependence

Mike Salguero · Apr 5, 2023

Channel expansion should work like wildcatting for oil: dig many small, cheap, rapid test holes, and only build progressively bigger infrastructure as a channel proves out — and the founder shouldn't go test new channels until someone else is fully running the working channel

Staging investment keeps test costs low, and the founder should only move on once someone is manning the existing rig and working it harder than the founder could

25:12 Wildcat style cheap tests before scaling and dont open new channels until current one fully staffed

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

Early-stage companies should concentrate on their one working channel, ideally a non-paid one, but at scale you want to be diversified and capped at no more than ~50% in any single channel even when concentration is short-term optimal

Breadth early makes measurement harder because of channel interactions; at scale there is real diversification risk — at Stitch Fix the 50% cap meant they weathered the Cambridge Analytica-era Facebook ads performance hit fine because they could reallocate across a diverse portfolio

37:50 Concentrate on one channel early but cap any single channel at roughly 50 percent once at scale

Phil Carter · Sep 20, 2024

You should begin diversifying into a second or third channel as soon as input metrics signal saturation is six to twelve months out, not when saturation arrives

Watch input metrics rather than outputs — as bottlenecks appear in the conversion funnel you either need high confidence they're solvable with product or creative tweaks, or you need to be moving to the next channel already

29:01 Diversify channels preemptively when leading indicators show saturation six to twelve months out

Kyle Norton · May 30, 2025

A multichannel acquisition strategy is essential so that when individual channels saturate or hit challenges you have other places to go

Their own mix has swung from 90% inbound to 70% outbound to 60% inbound plus base prospecting, cold outbound and partners, and will keep ebbing and flowing

23:22 Multichannel mix provides redundancy when individual channels saturate

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

You should both focus on the one or two channels where your audience actually is and still repost everywhere else

Some people only use the minor platforms, and because others overlook those channels you have a much greater chance of owning them and building an audience

31:55 Focus on core channels but repost content everywhere to own overlooked platforms

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

There are only six channels in the world (sales, partnerships, ads, SEO/search, content/inbound, influencers), and founders can pick theirs in an hour with cofounders by crossing off the ones that obviously don't fit

These are the only ways people find out about products; constraints like unit economics, price point, and search volume eliminate most options quickly

22:53 Channel choice can be narrowed quickly by elimination since only six channels exist

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Early-stage founders should do both: 10x the channel that is working and simultaneously keep opening new channels

You don't know what will work tomorrow, so you have to keep optimising every opportunity to build a sustainable business rather than acting out of fear

20:30 Both scale the working channel and keep opening new ones

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023

For enterprise products, channels like YouTube and social may drive awareness but will never be a meaningful source of customers; the core sales machine must be made to work first or everything else is noise

At scale those channels would be a small fraction of what drives customers, and pursuing them early pulls attention away from getting the core machine working

22:26 Enterprise core sales motion must work before peripheral channels add value

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023

Predicting when a growth loop will saturate is harder than identifying the constraint — companies tend to assume saturation comes sooner than it does — and the best companies, like HubSpot, set a multi-year goal and work backwards to what they should do today

At HubSpot this exercise revealed the single marketing product and single sales-and-marketing motion could not sustain 50% year-over-year growth for five years, which forced starting a multi-product strategy immediately since finding a second product takes a year or two

25:51 Predicting saturation timing is hard so set multiyear goals and work backward

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

The core three of any acquisition engine are Meta, Google, and lifecycle, and a company can scale to its first million in ARR off those three, alongside supporting investment in its site and founder-led content.

Meta and YouTube cover high-intent video, Google covers search intent from people who don't know your product exists, and lifecycle (email, SMS, push) is the net that nudges people in the right place.

8:57 Meta google and lifecycle are the core three

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Whether to kill an underperforming channel depends on severity: shut off immediately if there is no world in which it works, but give merely weak performers time because downstream levers may be the real cause

there are a million dials between the ad and the conversion — a hyper-personalized landing page matching the ad, even with the creator's face, could move the needle

34:23 Kill only hopeless channels give weak ones time

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Paid channel performance gets better over time rather than being best at launch, but each channel has its own scaling laws and eventually hits audience fatigue requiring diversification

At the start performance is always bad because you're waiting for conversions to accumulate

36:47 Each channel has its own scaling law and fatigue ceiling