What causes a growth tactic or channel to stop working over time?

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

SEO and email have remained stable growth channels over the last five years, and AdWords is relatively stable despite some mobile-side change

37:38 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

Any channel of real scale gives a competent operator years or even decades of runway, so founders who think a working channel will be exhausted within twelve months are underestimating it

He wrote the HubSpot blog fourteen or fifteen years ago and it is still growing traffic today through topic expansion and optimization; people abandon working channels out of boredom rather than necessity

Scope: assumes you are good at internet distribution; requires continuous improvement of the existing channel

12:03 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

Consumer SMS invite mechanics burned out quickly and have cooled off, with Clubhouse the last product to get real success from them

People decided they weren't going to spam their friends with SMS invites

37:54 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit

Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023 · hedged

SMS has died as a growth tactic because people now experience it as an intrusion

46:45 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

Jeff Jordan · Jan 16, 2023

Customer acquisition channels are in permanent flux — there is no durable acquisition monopoly, so operators must continually find the next channel

Google.com once had a monopoly on discovery and mobile upended it; the only constant is that it constantly changes

14:04 20VC: a16z's Jeff Jordan on The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Marketplaces, Two Core Features to Look for in All Marketplace Investments, Why Fragmented Supply is so Important & Lessons from Airbnb, Pinterest and Instacart on What Makes the Best Cohorts

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

Many growth channels have died or shrunk dramatically, Clubhouse being the clearest example

45:01 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

Jeff Jordan · Jan 16, 2023

Paid acquisition channels will remain extremely volatile going forward, independent of any recession impact

Apple's privacy changes hit Facebook, new channels like TikTok, Pinterest and Snap are emerging, and regulators worldwide are increasingly concerned about Facebook and Google using their ecosystem data to their own advantage

31:52 20VC: a16z's Jeff Jordan on The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Marketplaces, Two Core Features to Look for in All Marketplace Investments, Why Fragmented Supply is so Important & Lessons from Airbnb, Pinterest and Instacart on What Makes the Best Cohorts

Harry Stebbings · May 22, 2023

Consumer acquisition channels are dangerously volatile and outside founders' control — platform changes like Facebook's have transformed companies' acquisition overnight

Observed companies whose acquisition channels changed hugely after Facebook's changes

Scope: companies were not wiped out, but severely affected

15:40 20VC: Why Your Fund Model Should Not Rely on $10BN+ Outcomes, Why the Large Funds Got Too Large, The Rise of Solo GP's; The Pros and Cons & Is Consumer Subscription Even a Good Sector to Invest in with Nico Wittenborn @ Adjacent

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

Marketing a single marquee instructor stopped working for Masterclass, forcing a shift to selling the portfolio value of the whole subscription

Once every instructor on the platform was a marquee name, no individual instructor was surprising enough to drive signups, and post-COVID people were going outside again

9:03 Marketing tactic dies when the market saturates and novelty fades

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

The more open a marketing channel's underlying protocol, the less the tactic changes over time; channels controlled by a single company change dramatically.

When one company has financial incentives to evolve a platform, it changes the platform constantly; open protocols have no such incentive driver.

45:40 Open protocol channels change less than single company controlled channels

Mike Salguero · Apr 5, 2023

At ButcherBox's current scale the old tactics of blanketing Facebook and doing influencer marketing no longer work, and the company needs an entirely new acquisition channel

The business is too big for those channels to move the needle at roughly $600M in revenue

45:22 Channels that worked at small scale stop moving the needle at large scale

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Growth tactics rarely die — they plateau and become less effective rather than disappearing

Across most tactics he sees decline in effectiveness rather than death; the only real casualty he can name is marketing on Clubhouse

47:46 Growth tactics rarely die they plateau into reduced effectiveness

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023

Tactics die because the underlying distribution channel changed, usually after misuse breeds user skepticism and fatigue

Address book importing no longer works because it was so widely abused that users are skeptical — you can only do it now with earned trust and a good reason

46:53 Tactics die when distribution channel changes after misuse breeds skepticism and fatigue