From: Grant
To: Ax Ali
CC: Those who dare to dream
Growth Marketing: The Land of 10,000 Lakes
Hello Ax,
I’ve been working through an overwrought metaphor: growth marketing is like fishing in Minnesota.
I’ll come back to this–but let me intro the concept first. Growth marketing, distribution, sales, GTM, customer acquisition, whatever you want to call it. Reaching people and getting them to buy your stuff. Stuff? Anything, but I’m mainly thinking about software. It’s really hard.
IMO, it’s the most critical capability for tech businesses. It’s the white whale, the final boss. Unlike building, it hasn’t gotten massively easier. It’s gotten massively harder.
It’s so hard that this fishing thing is the best metaphor I have for it. And yes, I’m a white guy from the midwest.
Ok, imagine I’m a person who just arrived in Minnesota. I’ve got to learn to fish so I can feed myself and my family. I don’t know a darn thing about fishing because I’m a product nerd from SF or something. I’d better get to work.
(btw: fish = customers/users)
I roll up to my nearest of the 10,000 lakes, and I look around.
Okay, I see a bunch of people using fishing poles. I’d better get one of those. Some people are using nets or spears, but idk, seems like more people use poles so I should just start there right?
And they are using lures at the ends of these poles. Ok, I guess I’ll get a couple. These ones look fun.
Ok some are fishing from the shore but others are in the middle of the lake using a boat. Should I buy a boat? I feel like I already bought so much. Do I need to get a permit to fish in this lake? Should I even fish in this lake, or one of the other 9,999?
Here are some other questions:
- Should I chum the waters first? (awareness/brand advertising before CTAs/conversion-focused efforts)
- Should I use a net, rod, spear, or something else? (the “wide net” vs direct sales)
- Spearfishing has lower upfront costs, but I get less fish per day. But even if I don’t get scale, at least I know I’ll be profitable, right?
- Net fishing. I need a boat and a net and stuff to do this, which costs a lot–but I’ll catch more fish. Those fish will pay back my expenses quickly, right?
- Which lures, bait or chum should I use? (types of ad creative, outreach, or other copy)
- Do I need permits to fish? (platform fees, registrations, +)
- Which lakes should I fish in? (channels and platforms)
- The big ones have more fish but also more fishermen and stricter permits (Meta, Google, +)
- The small ones have less fish, but maybe I can get them easier (niche channels)
- Where within this lake should I fish? (audience targeting within platform)
- How much should I spend on all this stuff? Crap, I don’t even know the LTV of my fish yet!
- What time of day will I have the most success fishing? What time of year? Should I only fish then, or is the word already out and I’ll just get outcompeted then? (seasonality, attention windows, and competition)
- Wait a minute, should I create my own pond? (building an organic following)
- This is actually insane. Should I just pay someone else to fish for me? They probably know how to fish better than me–but will I still make money after paying them? (ad/marketing agencies)
This is why fishing as a hobby is considered relaxing, and fishing as a profession is considered high-stress. If you’re in it for fun, all these seem like charming micro-challenges to figure out whenever you feel so inclined. Every little success feels like an awesome miracle, because it kind of is. If you’re in it for sustenance, you’d better figure all of this out, and soon. Success is just business, and failure feels personal.
Welcome to the world of growth marketing.
When faced with these overwhelming uncertainties, people tend to gravitate toward a few common strategies.
Imitation
My approach to so much of this growth marketing stuff has been to start with imitation. Like the person I described at the start, to watch my competitors and mimic their actions. Unfortunately, that’s wrong.
Oh, looks like this person is having some success here. I’ll just fish the same place with the same gear. Nope. That guy is imitating another dude, who is imitating another dude, who is imitating another person. By the time you get there, they’ve scared off the fish–and any early success they had from imitation without real knowledge soon disappears. It’s back to the drawing board, and you’re constantly reactive, disadvantaged, and behind.
Testing
Once I figured out the error of my ways, I swung to the far opposite end of the spectrum. Rather than imitating, I tried to boil the ocean (lake, whatever), by restyling myself as Mr. I’ve-Always-Been-a-Super-Rigorous-Data-Guy. Collect all the data, test all the strategies, massively in parallel. Statistical significance. Acceptance criteria/gates. Post-Mortems. Testing sounds great and like the right answer (especially to your boss), but it’s unfortunately no longer scalable. It’s 2026, and we’re in the land of 10,000 lakes here.
How the heck can I get enough data of which lakes, lures, poles, times, etc work best, without burning a huge amount of money or time or team effort? In short, I can’t. Testing a million strategies and seeing what sticks sounds smart, but it’s not scalable. Equally importantly, you can’t count on what worked once, in a short test period, to work again.
If your efforts result in an algorithm which tells you the right strategy to pursue every time, stop marketing your product and start marketing the algorithm.
“Magic”
Next, I thought, “This is a sucker’s game. Why even pay? I’m going all organic, all pull, no push. Any other strategy is a sinking ship.” This sounds great too (especially to your investors), and it can work, but the reality is very different from the dream.
Can I somehow make the fish come to me? How about building my own lake or somehow not having to fish at all? People are doing that all the time, right? That one high-school kid got his app to $Bajillion ARR using only social media. I can too. All I have to do is go viral once. That’s what happened to everyone on How I Built This.
Wrong. Free lunch does not reliably exist in the land of 10,000 lakes. And free lunch is not a strategy (I have to tell myself this all the time). And building an organic following is far from free. To do this, you need PMF for your content, PMF for your product, and they need to have a unified sensibility which feels organic to your customers. This can be rewarding, but is more work than running ads. And it’s rarely enough to supply all the growth you need.
Outsourcing
Now I throw my hands up. Maybe I never should have come here–I don’t belong. I wish the ring had never come to me, Gandalf. What about just paying someone else to do this?
Well, you can do this, and it might work, but your margins will take a hit, and you’ll miss learning the most critical part of your business. Down the line, when you want to experiment, pivot, or expand, it’ll be an uncoordinated game of telephone rather than a cohesive effort.
I tend to think, with the domain of growth marketing exploding in complexity, it increasingly makes sense to outsource, but as I’ll share in another email, there are some things you can’t afford to not learn. Yes, you can do both, but you’ll have to.
–
Crap. So how do I do this? Well, if you’re a very rich, perhaps even venture-backed, fisherperson, you can throw money at all this stuff and improve the chance that you’ll fall into an answer. The rest of us have got to figure it out ourselves.
Now my astute readers (aka you, Ax, if you haven’t yet fallen asleep) will note that there are a few questions I have failed to ask. Namely, who are my fish?
Saying something this trite makes me want to roll my eyes and/or eat glass: be the fish. Watch the fish, Ax. Learn who they are, what they want, why they want what they want, what their rhythms are. What scares the fish, Ax? What bores them? What delights them?
Then find out where they hang out, what they like to eat, when they like to eat, how much they like to eat. Talk to the fish, Ax. Put on some goggles and get down there. Go to the fish bar and grill, get the corner booth, and just listen.
What am I saying? User research comes before user acquisition. It cannot come after. I’ve made this mistake myself too many times: “I’ll find out who my customer is after I spend $XX,XXX on this ad campaign.” Nope. The truth is, I was scared to research my fish, because it meant diving into the unknown and really trying to understand them. Trying to understand ads was scary enough.
Is this a plug for Seena Labs? I actually didn’t intend it that way, but it did turn out that way.
Once you know your fish, start by going where you have the highest confidence where they’ll be, when you have the highest confidence they’ll be there, and give them the bait you have the highest confidence they’ll take. See if you can make the math work. If you can, keep going and scale the strategy. Then, move on to the second-highest confidence set of conditions. Operate a (read:) manageable number of parallel strategies. Fish get turned off by sloppy fishing.
Eventually, and not too soon, you can abstract your fish into personas (“Hungry Salmon Steve”)--but personas aren’t tools for you to understand your fish. They’re for you to explain your fish to non-fisherpeople. Your job is to know your fish, not draw cartoons of them and call it a day.
Whose job? Well, everybody’s job. Definitely the job of the solopreneur, founder, CEO, PM, engineer, marketer, CX person. Increasingly, the job of everyone else too.
Ok I’m done. What do you think of all this, Ax?
