We've reached peak Facebook Ads dependency
This might not settle well. I'm guilty of this, but we have to shed light on what is impacting building a startup. For the past few years, some companies have gone from having multiple growth strategies to focusing on only one – cracking Facebook. Why? Because it seems to be working. But, for how long?
Many years ago, at a previous startup, I'd get together with my team and we'd talk about a holistic approach to meeting our goals. We had one strategy with at last 4-5 different sub-strategies running simultaneously. Nowadays, while doing some consulting, I've sat in many meetings with different e-commerce or D2C market companies where the main discussion around a growth strategy is usually "How do we crack FB at a CPA that meets our goals? We need to test!". These companies go on to spend tens of thousands of dollars testing to arrive at the same conclusion over time and frustrated: is almost impossible to keep the CPA low on FB over time.
This is unsustainable, as we grow brands, services, etc., we cannot depend on just one service or maybe two (Google Adwords) to grow companies, yet more than 60% of the startups I've recently talked with seem to be focusing on this.
There may be other nuances to this topic, but I have some questions to the community:
- When we get to the point of peak Facebook Ads dependency, how do we combat it?
- Is it possible to grow companies organically without the help of ads anymore? I mean reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
- Have you been able to scale your company without paying for ads? If so, what did you do?
Would love to hear some of your answers here.
Yes, it's certainly possible to grow without advertising. Speaking from recent personal experience, Indie Hackers has reached almost 1M people since last August without paid advertising. Stripe doesn't advertise, either. I don't believe Nomad List advertised. Etc.
The common thread here is building products that people in a specific niche find valuable and noteworthy. They talk to each other about it, and the product grows.
More generally, I think exhausting customer acquisition channels is a normal problem to have. It's not just Facebook ads — almost every channel will eventually hit the point of diminishing returns. And so you have to evolve as you grow.
Gail Goodman gave a great talk a few years back about negotiating what she called the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death. It's more than worth a watch. She grew her SaaS business to an enormous size by trying channel after channel and never stopping.
FB advertising - I created some sponsored posts and all I got were fake profiles liking it...
well that whole "build a product people love" blabla is all nice and well but more often than not not the best product but the product with the best marketing wins, as rob walling states in his book "start small, stay small" and I agree.
I'm working on a accessory project with a friend of mine and we find it really hard to grow. Our stuff is the best you can get probably in whole germany and we only get positive feedback but only with organic traffic it's super hard to grow.
Great Content Marketing would be marketing angle that can grow you nicely but also there is the problem of seeding your content for free. It works but it's not as effective as buying reach on social media.
And it doesn't work for everybody I guess.
Hello mate,
I haven't got much experience of this to be honest, but I am assuming you would want to be doing something like this no...
http://mrgrillet.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/long-term-growth-planning.png
...assuming this chart makes sense.
I'd be keen to carry this conversation on if possible...?
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