In 2013, I wrote "How New User Acquisition Channels Drive Change." The core of the piece is that with every new major acquisition channel that emerges, we see massive new companies emerge with it. This has proven to be true time and time again.
But choosing, testing and scaling emerging acquisition channels is incredibly hard. For existing companies, they require a different approach than attacking mature channels for a few reasons:
🎲 Lower Probability of Success, But Much Higher Returns When Successful
By definition, if you wait until you are confident the channel will be huge, it is not emerging and the returns will be smaller. This means that companies have to look at "success" differently vs other efforts.
🧠 There Are No Experts To Hire
When a channel is emerging, there are no "experts" that you can hire to establish the channel for you. You need to hire an "explorer" who can be a different very profile vs the rest of your team. This is partially difficult because the best explorers are often founders.
Adam Grenier (ex-Uber, Hotel Tonight) and Scott Tousley (Head of User Acquisition at HubSpot), wrote one the most in depth piece on this topic I've seen: How To Choose, Test, and Scale Emerging Acquisition Channels.
They lay out a comprehensive framework to walk through this that:
Customer <> Channel <> Company Overlap
Evaluating the DNA of the Channel
Evaluating the Company DNA
Comments