After measuring a billion dollars in ad spend and advising startups and scale-ups on Growth strategy, I am convinced that startups shouldn't spend a $ on paid ads for a very long time (I’m talking like maybe even until Series B or really strong PMF if you’re not raising VC money). Below I'll share the quantitative research and qualitative anecdotes for my POV on what the new modern marketing stack looks like.

Let’s also look at some qualitative anecdotes and learnings:

Last, let’s segment the world into 4 categories through a 2x2 matrix (my favorite):

It only makes sense to advertise for 1 of the 4 groups. At any point, only 5% are ready to buy. Of those, 80% have made up their mind so you’re trying to convince 20% of the 5%. You’re competing over 1% of your target audience. And so is every one else. So, what should founders and their companies do?

They should go ALL IN on social media and owned channels:

Quoting Paul Graham, startups are told “To do things that don’t scale”. That quote is often shared because it implies things that can’t be replicated but are essential to the startup. Organic channels is actually one of those things that you should do and does scale but can’t be replicated. I can’t post about your experience on LinkedIn or make a video of you. I just can’t state enough how big I think founder led marketing is.

To not be repetitive, let’s start at a high level why I’m advocating for these channels.

Now, let’s talk about the economic benefits. These can be summarized in a quick table by showing MAU and CPMs to advertise on these platforms. Now, it’s hard to showcase exactly how many impressions you’ll get per platform if you posted organically as it’s usually a % of your followers, but instead I’ll show that the ceiling when you post organically is much higher.

There are 1.20 billion on LinkedIn. Less than 1% post regularly. Let’s reread that. There are 1.20 billion on LinkedIn. Less than 1% post regularly. It’s a channel for the taking!

“But, Sundar, LinkedIn is a professional site” Bullshit. It’s a social media site first and foremost. When I worked at Bounce, which was a consumer tech marketplace for luggage storage, I would post frequently about my experience.

Here’s just one DM that came from it (I have at least 2-3 others + all those who didn’t DM me but may have tried Bounce because of me)

Now, let’s do the math for a startup. Let’s assume it has 10 people and each post generates 1000 impressions once you get going.

10 people x 3 posts a week x 40 weeks x 1000 impressions = 1,200,000 impressions.

Now, assuming a CPM of $15, you’d get $18K worth of paid ads a year just from posting. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. With paid ads, you have a linear funnel. With posting you don’t. For example, $18K on paid ads will 100% only get you 1,200,000 impressions. Changing nothing else, posting on LinkedIn could get you 6,000,000 impressions. 5x that for the same cost!

Let’s use me as an example:

In the past year, I’ve generated 5 million impressions. Let’s even strip out this massive outlier of one post that didn’t 3 million. I’ve still done 2 million impressions and I post roughly 5x a week I generated $30K worth of impressions this past year! And this is going to compound. With the same amount of work, I’ll probably generate $50K the next year and then $100K worth of ads the next year. Single handedly.

Oh, and the part I’m not touching on yet… you’re building SO MUCH credibility when you post. It’s why so many of you are here reading this 😀.

Applying that to startups, people buy from companies they trust and having a founder be transparent builds trust.So not only are these impressions but they’re quality impressions. Here’s a great example of an experiment where a company posted from their company account and their CEOs account:

The “Executive”s post had significantly better performance. Now imagine that executive had posted 46 times instead of 14. The numbers would be 3x better.

Now, let’s apply this same logic to posting on X / Twitter, with a couple nuances.

I just got on X, but I wish I had joined it years ago. It still seems to be the most raw form of people’s thinking (good and bad). Especially within tech, it seems to be where most thought leaders and builders are. Seems like a no brainer place to start. The bonus too is that you don’t have to be as “polished” as LinkedIn (a common feeling people have). You just have to post. The more raw the better. The more times the better. Just share.

Now, what about the video first platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube?

TikTok has 1.59 Billion users. Supposedly 83% have posted at least 1x (not sure I believe that) but point is your users are there and people are okay with raw content. More importantly, so many people are shifting to using TikTok as their source of search and the start of their discovery journey. There are also strong communities of subniches like BookTok, FoodTok, etc.

Here’s a brilliant example of founder let marketing on TikTok can blow up overnight:

The founder of BiteSight (think doordash meets tiktok) shared his story on LinkedIn of how his one post went viral to the tune of amassing 100 MILLION VIEWS in 24 hours. ONE VIDEO. 100 MILLION VIEWS. He now has 73k followers on TikTok . He’s still probably considered a micro influencer but he’s doing this while running his startup.

Let’s revisit the math:

The average TikTok gets 6000 impressions.

10 people x 3 posts a week x 40 weeks x 6000 impressions = 7,200,000 impressions.That’s $36K worth of paid ads assuming a $5 CPM on TikTok.

On Instagram + Youtube, it’s the same math (although not as likely to go viral on Youtube). But, the beauty is that you can use the same creatives! You literally have one creative that you can disperse across 3 channels! And as a reminder, Instagram has 2 Billion MAU and Youtube has 2.53 Billion MAU. Your audience is 100% there.

Listen, it’s still product’s job to deliver, but according to recent studies, organic search has a 14.6% conversion rate, while PPC has a 10% conversion rate. While SEO is traditionally considered organic search, people searching for your company name (aka “Branded Search” ) is still going to convert well too. It’s a myth that someone searching for your name magically clicks on a competitor unless it’s SO much more compelling. Remember 80% have basically made up their mind.

This is quite straight forward but it’s 1st party data and therefore highly actionable. In addition you own distribution and don’t have to worry about algorithms. They are fully yours to control.

Referrals are such a high value channel and SO underinvested. Just look at your product and think of the following things you can optimize:

This is a product bet that every team should be investing in and it’s probably better than that random update on your roadmap you’ve decided to prioritize because your friend told you it was awesome. Referrals also have the added benefit in that the quality of users is often high.

Unlike affiliates which often brings in poor quality users, only people that loved the product and want to share it will refer. It also often has the best conversion funnel as a marketing channel because trust has already been built up.

Stop sleeping on this.

When founders here CRM, they think email. That’s part of it. But push notifications are also a major part and one of the highest value places you can implement push notifications is in the checkout flow. Carts (or checkouts) are abandoned ~ 70% of the time so if you can configure push notifications / emails for this then you’re getting some more revenue!

Now, CRM is not something you’re going to set up immediately but once you have momentum it’s a bet you should invest in. And if you’re not ready for a full time person, there’s an ocean of consultants who you just need for 5-10 hours a week to help you with this. The ROI should be easy to back into.

The biggest blocker to this is going to be “Yeah, but I just don’t know where to start”.

There are a few options:

To do this, try recording your thoughts into a voice note and then just dump that into chatgpt/claude to create 3-5 posts for you. Edit it to sound like you and then boom.

For other more video like channels, it’s just about testing and iterating. There are tools like capcut (TikTok’s editing platform) that help you do this quickly. There’s no magic recipe. Just put in the work.

This one is less of a DIY. My best advice is to prioritize these two channels in your roadmaps. Given how important both of these are for retention, it’s important to focus on maximizing these channels.

So, that’s it. If you’re thinking of launching those paid ads, think again and ask yourself why are you doing it? If it’s because you can’t wait then all you’re doing is pulling forward results but you’re doing so at a cost.

Here it is: