Organic growth or Ads which you think is better?
Ok this is one of the issue that any entrepreneur with limited budget will always have. Do I use whatever money for ads or develop the product.
I found a book that can help us solve this issue and I would highly recommend you guys to read it. The book is Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg ( one of duck duck go co founder )
The idea is simple, traction or marketing strategy will always change according to what stage are you in. So determining what stage are you in is very important.
Your product will always be in one of these 3 stages:
- Finding product market fit
- Finding working traction
- Scaling the business
Each on of these stage will have different traction approach.
So, back to organic growth or ads.
Ideally if you are just starting, having huge people visiting your website is almost useless because at this stage ( stage 1 ) you are not sure yet if this is the product that your customer are looking for, so running ads will almost waste of money if you are expecting it for a return.
During stage 1 you should focus on having small amount of people using the product having feedback from them. Handpicking your customer is the best option ( you contact people one by one ) but this is very slow. So you can try using content marketing to get attention and communicate with customer.
Running ads is not that bad if you have some budget, but remember that you are not expecting much of return. You are expecting to find what product do you customer want.
For stage 2 and 3 you guys can read the book itself but the idea here is stage 2 your effort will be 70% trying to find working traction and when running ads during this stage the idea is to find out how to make it work. During stage 3 you can gamble in much of your money on ads as at this point your product is something people want and you also have understanding on how to make your traction channel work.
It is a great book I would recommend you guys to read it and also here a blog posts that you guys can check out on this topic Choosing between organic content or ads
Thanks for sharing! I'll bump the book on my to-read list
thanks, also if you are doing social media analysis I would recommend you to try out the tool that I made app.socialtrendanalysis.com . The tool enable you to receive daily analysis of your competitors' social media analysis all in a single screen making it easier for you to get the overview and insight.
If you find the tool might help you, I would love your feedback on the tool.
Azhar, you've touched on a crucial debate many entrepreneurs face: organic growth vs paid ads.
The insights from "Traction" provide a solid framework for deciding which strategy to pursue based on the stage of our business.
Additionally, for those in the early stages of finding product-market fit, could you suggest any specific strategies or channels for organic growth that have worked well for you or others you know?
Your perspective highlights the importance of aligning marketing efforts with the business lifecycle, offering a strategic approach to growth.
It really depend on the product to find the correct channel , and mostly it happen with trial an error.
What i could recommend is at early stage you write down all the possible channels and strategy that you are going to use on those channel in a single paper, and give it like 2 - 5 attempts each and then see what working, try to figure out why and then select few channel that benefit you
In general, most experts recommend a balanced approach that combines organic SEO and some paid social/search ads.
Organic helps establish long-term presence and authority, while ads can supplement with quicker gains.
The best option also depends greatly on available budget and performance metrics unique to each business. Both certainly have proven value when used strategically.