Our biggest mistakes on the road to $88,000 in revenue

Re: Don't waste money on paid ads to validate your idea early on, I've been spending a bunch of time reading through Julian Shapiro's Growth Marketing Guide recently. He spends a lot of time talking about ads. Here are some points I gathered from him that are relevant:

1. Most of the time you only really get one growth channel working. And this is even more specific than "ads". Like, you might get Google ads working but not Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. So then, the point of exploring an ad channel is moreso as a gamble. A low risk, high reward gamble. You spend maybe a couple hundred or thousand dollars, and then there's a chance that it drives hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

2. He claims that ads are usually the best drivers of traffic for companies that are just launching:

Companies just launching tend to see the most channel traffic in this order:

• Ads (and/or sales if B2B)
• Word of mouth and referrals
• Content marketing
• PR
• Everything else

As a healthy company matures, its largest channels tend to re-order as follows:

• Word of mouth and referrals
• Content marketing
• Ads
• Everything else

3. LinkedIn ads in particular seem to only work in very specific niches.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn ad clicks are so expensive ($12-$20 USD), that they're only affordable if you're selling high-priced products or services.

In fact, if you don't earn over $10,000 USD in the lifetime of a customer, you probably cannot afford LinkedIn ads. That's an honest conclusion from seeing millions of dollars spent on LinkedIn.

This threshold unfortunately rules out most B2C companies not selling financial products, vehicles, or homes. And many B2B companies.

He says LinkedIn usually is $12-30 CPC, so your $10 CPC actually was on the very low end! On the other hand, other channels can be $1-2 CPC.

Great read! Thanks for the advice :)

Hey, can you elaborate on #8 please