"Most successful companies I see grow off 3–5 main marketing channels, not 10."

"The key part is working out: how you can create a reinforcement mechanism so that a channel leads to more users without additional effort each time."

"You may have Product-Market Fit, nailed the communication and language side, and worked out the right business model but still not see growth."

"1. Sticking to the standard channels"

"There is a window of opportunity with a new channel where it is most profitable. After that, it declines. With Meta and Google ads, that window is long passed."

"use Jobs to be Done interviews to understand where your customers are looking and present to see what your other options are."

"2. Trying to be present on too many channels"

"The best companies dive deep into a channel; they find a growth loop that works there and go hard on it."

"What can they do to make that loop spin faster? What channels will support that loop?"

"You don’t have to be on every social media channel. You don’t have to do every advertising channel."

"The harm is that you can’t focus more on what is working. The harm is the opportunity cost of that time and lack of focus."

"If you’ve been trying a lot, and it is still far off where it needs to be, you’ll need to start making bigger changes. If it still isn’t working, be critical about whether it is the right channel for you."

"3. Dismissing pre-PMF Channels"

"Don’t be afraid to revisit those pre-PMF channels, especially if your customers use them based on your customer interviews."

"4. Not to trying to use growth loops"

"This helps lead to far faster growth than if you just focused on linear channels."

"You have a mix of channels for each part of the customer journey."

"You look for channels that have synergy."

"You define how to test and try out that channel properly."

"When we started growth hacking, it was all about AARRR funnels, but as technology evolves and competition rises, funnels are no longer enough to drive growth."

"While they remain necessary, loops emerged as a significant growth driver. Loops result in self-reinforcing growth."

"Whilst marketing has always included ‘product’, it focuses more on the beginning of the funnel on how to acquire new customers and generate growth."

"Growth, in contrast, looks equally across the entire funnel to find growth opportunities."

"Due to its agile cross-functional process, growth identifies and, more importantly, validates opportunities faster than traditional marketing."

"Growth increases conversion by going beyond acquisition and optimizing the key moments that lead to purchase, thus increasing effectiveness."

"1. Overemphasis on lead generation"

"3. Paid acquisition costs have significantly increased"

"4. Most of all — limits in scalability due to a linear nature"

"There are two types of loops, product-based and non-product based loops. We start with the most common non-product based loops."

"Viral loops: Word of mouth drives more customers based on a non-monetary or monetary reward."

"Content loops: Content drives interest in the business and allows for more content to be created."

"Paid / Sales loop: Both paid advertising and sales representatives result in more customers, and that revenue is then reinvested in more ads or representatives."

"Take Quora as an example; they have a content loop where the questions people ask get indexed, which drives more traffic and leads to more questions."

"Whatever the loop type, the core of designing the loop is understanding which output will drive more input and the loop's completion."

"Then the momentum results from a strong proposition: what drives value for the end-user at each step of the loop."

"Most non-product loops are engagement-based. For example, viral (referral), content and sales are built around the product experience."

"We talked about viral (referral) loops as a non-product led growth, but they can also be product-led."

"In contrast, a product-led growth loop triggers users to share pins with friends as part of the product’s functionality within the platform itself."

"Pinterest has layered these two loops resulting in additional momentum. Most successful businesses have stacked multiple loops to increase the growth rate."

"Lower prices (at first) attract customers resulting in more traffic to the website. The growing customer base attracts more sellers. More sellers bring a wider selection of products which increases appeal to customers."

"Once it reaches a critical point, Amazon becomes the go-to supplier for most categories of goods. Their scale and innovation drive costs down, secure lower prices and keep the wheel spinning. You can see how once in motion, this multi-loop is self-perpetuating."

"It seems that ex-marketers tend to join the funnel camp whilst ex-product managers become a part of the PLG camp."

"One group emphasizes efficient means to attract customers (the aforementioned hacks), while the others point to long-term scalability and costs."

"It is the combination of funnels and loops that drives exceptional growth."

"The funnel fuels the acquisition loop until it exceeds the threshold of self-perpetuation. From this point on, the acquisition loop becomes the main driving factor of growth. A secondary retention loop prevents churn and further adds to the momentum of the acquisition loop."

"Because we are growth hackers, we can not resist coining a new name for integrating funnel and loops: “Growth Foop”. Let’s see if it catches on."

"You are building on shaky foundations: too much is manual/unscalable growth, so your resources limit you."

"You haven’t got product/market fit (and other types of fit) right yet, so you have managed to get the first group of customers in but are struggling to scale it from there further."

"You have gotten stuck optimizing instead of focusing on big bets. As a result, you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns; the same amount of time and effort brings back fewer results."

"you start hitting the ceiling and realize you’re struggling to convert people and scale up further. This is why it is important to keep talking with customers and non-customers."

"Scrambling to improve the situation and trying to get more done won’t solve the problem."

"As mentioned before, turning things around is all about figuring out what happened in the first place."

"Remember that growth is a combination of different areas:"

"Often when growth stalls we focus and blame marketing rather than looking holistically at growth. When actually whether or not you can scale your product is the result of getting multiple matches right:"

"Too often, slow-growth companies blame marketing channels and think they need another channel to solve it."

"Product/Channel Fit: Are the channels suitable for marketing your product?"

"Channel/Market Fit: What are the right channels to match your market?"

"So many things can go wrong when you don’t spend enough time in the beginning when you’re building your foundation."

"Growth comes from daring to do things drastically differently rather than hitting your head against the same wall."