Grow mainly through paid ads once the product clearly works

Larissa Morimoto… is a mobile app. We're also a web app and we have an API, and we've grown significantly since 2019. So we're able to scale to almost 300 million downloads across a variety of different methods. And I think like most apps, we relied a lot on paid acquisition for our growth, especially the initial stages where we were still testing a lot of things out. We found product market fit really early on as well, and paid really helped us scale that.

Larissa MorimotoBut after a while, once you've grown so much through paid channels, you start experiencing similar patterns. So you start seeing things like ad fatigue, you start seeing that your campaigns aren't performing as well. CPAs might go up, especially nowadays where everybody's trying to crack digital acquisition. You need to be creative in some way or another because your next 10,000 customers are probably not going to come from Meta or any other acquisition channel or digital acquisition channel if you haven't been able to see success so far.

Larissa MorimotoAnd so I self-identify as somebody who's chronically online. It's in my LinkedIn bio, it's my personality. And I love all things consumer marketing as well. So I take a lot of inspiration from that, whether it's in the form of brand trips that makeup companies do and a lot of other consumer-oriented ways of marketing. And the reality is that we're all living in the attention economy. So everybody's trying to get your attention. We're fighting for …

Larissa MorimotoAnd if you're a digital app where you've relied so much on paid acquisition, if 70% of your marketing budget is concentrated in a single channel, you're likely already putting your growth at risk because if one thing happens to that channel, then you have no other way of getting back. It's kind of like a treadmill. The treadmill's on, you're probably going to be growing, but if your treadmill's off, there's nowhere for you to go.

Larissa MorimotoAnd so we were able to scale to over 50 million ARR using paid as our main source of growth. And this is public information, I double checked. And it's something that my manager [inaudible 00:04:10] at the time, used to say all the time, we need to capture people where they are. And they're probably on the streets, they're probably in markets and restaurants and thrift shops. And so there's this beauty of offline where you're meeting people where they are and then helping them remember you as a human and not just a SaaS product, because people do tend to remember humans more.

David BarnardSo now that you've been experimenting with this, and we'll get to a couple of examples to put this more concretely for folks, but what are some of the things you've learned as far as how to be successful, what to measure? Just how do you think about these non-traditional advertising opportunities for an app?