In Dan Hockenmaier's and Lenny Rachitsky's experience, founders are often surprised to learn that there are very few routes to scalable new customer acquisition. Here, this duo unpacks the three ways to drive consumer startup growth, offering a detailed framework and set of case studies for accelera. This article is by Dan Hockenmaier founder of growth strategy firm Basis One and former director of growth marketing at Thumbtack and Lenny Rachitsky a former product lead and head of consumer supply growth at Airbnb.
As advisors to early and growth-stage companies, we spend a lot of time talking to founders about growth. One of the more common questions we hear, especially early on, is about finding more ways to grow. Unfortunately, this often leads to founders running head-first into one of the most common startup failure modes: investing in too many channels at once, and as a result not investing in any one channel enough.
We find ourselves repeating this same advice over and over, and so in the hope of saving startups time and heartache, we decided to put our thoughts to paper.
In our experience, founders are often surprised to learn that there are very few routes to scalable new customer acquisition. There are two additional lanes sales and partnerships which we won't cover in this post because they are rarely effective in consumer businesses.
And there are other tactics to boost customer acquisition e. To demonstrate this point, look back at the most successful consumer businesses of the last 10 years β every company achieved initial scale in a market by excelling at just one of three lanes:. Once you get to even moderate scale, each of these lanes becomes highly competitive.
