Research desk

Growth Marketing

Acquisition is a financial problem with a creative surface. Every channel has a payback window, a saturation point and a margin requirement — and the ones that look cheapest on a dashboard are frequently the most expensive once you account for what you actually keep.

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Rented, earned and owned

Every channel falls into one of three buckets, and a durable programme needs all three in the right proportion.

  1. Rented — paid mediaInstant, measurable, and it stops the moment you stop paying. Use it to test demand and to fill gaps, not as the foundation.
  2. Earned — organic search and referralSlow to build, compounds indefinitely, and it is the only channel where your cost per acquisition falls over time.
  3. Owned — email and communityThe audience you can reach without an intermediary. Its value is measured in revenue per subscriber per year, and it is what makes the other two affordable.
  4. Measure payback, not ROASA channel that returns 3× over eighteen months and one that returns 2× in thirty days are completely different financial instruments.

Margin decides everything

ROAS without gross margin is meaningless. On a 22% margin, a 4× return is a loss — and most dashboards will still colour it green.

Content decays without a cadence

Traffic typically peaks around month nine and declines thereafter. Refreshing an existing page beats publishing a new one from zero.

Flows beat broadcasts

Lifecycle automations produce a quarter to two-fifths of email revenue from under 5% of sends, and they run while you sleep.

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The Friday Brief

Channel economics, weekly.

Payback windows, CAC benchmarks and the occasional teardown of a campaign that looked profitable and was not.

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