Referrals Are Not a Channel
Forty-two percent of new customers came from referrals. The growth team called it their best channel. It wasn't a channel. It was a product that worked.
Angle
Attribution
3 posts
Doubling the Channel Halved It
Spend up 40%, pipeline up 60% -- the team celebrated. Six months later conversion collapsed. The 'doubling' was buying the wrong customers.
The marketing spend with no attribution
Six hundred thousand a quarter, four channels, clean CAC on the dashboard. The dashboard was wrong — it took a Series B investor and a holdout test to prove it.