Stop Starting From Zero
A CEO recently reached out to me for growth advice. His company runs on a business model I know well, so I was happy to meet.
We walked through his marketing channels one by one. Only one of them, LinkedIn outreach, was working. He wanted a scalable channel that compounds and, in his words, "doesn't start from zero each month."
My answer was that he already had one.
I get the instinct. Outreach can feel like a treadmill, and SEO and social look like "holy grail" channels that'll run themselves once you build them. But those channels take time, and outreach was more scalable than he thought.
So I told him three things that you can follow too:
- Invest heavily in what's already working
- Chip away at the "holy grail" channels that take more time
- Split your effort 80/20 so one algorithm change can't take you out (I learned that one the hard way)
The first one sounds obvious, but it's actually what most people get wrong.
Invest Heavily in What's Working
Finding a marketing channel that works is hard. It means you have product market fit. So when people find one, you'd expect them to pour everything they have into it.
Most do the opposite.
They either catch shiny object syndrome, decide they need more channels, or convince themselves their channel isn't the best one. For whatever the reason, they typically move on or stop investing in it as soon as they see some success.
Alex Hormozi's advice is to go all in on one thing. He talks ad nauseam about founders running two businesses where one is clearly working better than the other, and yet they still want to spend their time on both. His answer is to put everything into the one that's working.
Marketing channels work the same way. When one is working, triple down on it before you spend your time and money anywhere else.
The CEO I met with was discounting outreach because it looked unscalable, so I told him to think about it like a growth loop.
Take paid ads, for example. You spend money, earn a return on ad spend (ROAS), and reinvest it in the ads that are working. The more you make, the more you put back in. That's a loop, and it's how ads scale, even if you're "starting from zero each month."
Outreach across LinkedIn and email uses the same logic. You pay for the tools, the accounts, and maybe the people who run it. The channel brings in revenue, and that revenue buys more tools, more accounts, and more people who increase output.
Outreach takes work every month. But as long as you reinvest, each month starts with more volume than the last, so you never start from zero.
Still, it will never be passive. He was right to want the holy grail channels like SEO and organic social media. They just take longer than anyone thinks.
The Holy Grail Channels Take Time
Holy grail channels offer real reach, trust, authority, and control. They're scalable, semi-passive, recurring, and predictable, and everyone wants them because they look like a cure-all.
Unfortunately, building them takes consistent effort before you see results. You produce great content, promote it, and eventually hit the hockey stick of growth. But before the hockey stick is the flat part, which can last years.
So invest in them, yes. Just keep feeding the less scalable loops that are working too, so they kickstart your growth while the longer-term channels build momentum (Paul Graham calls it doing things that don't scale).
That's how I run Flyletter. Outreach across LinkedIn and email brings quicker results and quicker feedback. I can test a message through outreach and see whether it lands far faster than I could through posts that barely get seen yet.
Meanwhile, I chip away at SEO and social. I post weekly, analyze the results, and make iterative improvements, using what lands in outreach to shape what I post. When I hit the hockey stick, those channels will either compound the outreach or replace it. I broke down how the two work together in Three Growth Marketing Pillars That Scale Any Business.
If you're building one of these channels, pick a weekly cadence you can actually hold to and run it indefinitely.
But how much effort should go where?
Split It 80/20
I think about it using the Pareto principle. Put 80% of your effort into what's working and 20% into testing new channels and building out the long-term ones.
Investing that 20% gives you two benefits. It builds the scalable channels you likely covet, and it hedges against the risk of being a single-channel business.
I learned why channel diversity matters as the General Manager of a website doing 4 million monthly page views from SEO. We built the entire business on that one channel (I'd know, I was employee 14 out of nearly 100 and helped grow traffic 10x).
Then some of our link-building tactics got us hit with a manual action from Google. Basically a shadow-ban until you fix it, and it works like an anchor on your site.
Traffic dropped by more than 30%, and it led to hefty layoffs. It was painful.
We'd found one channel that worked and put everything we had into it. There wasn't a second one to save us. That's the risk the 20% protects you from.
I'm happy to say that we bounced back and invested more heavily in email marketing to harden the business.
Bottom Line
The CEO I met with asked me how to build a scalable channel that compounds and doesn't start from zero, and he already had one.
Invest heavily in what's working, build the more scalable channels for the long term, and split your effort 80/20 so one algorithm change can't take out your business.
What's the one channel working for you right now, and how much of your attention does it actually get?
Writer, founder, and AI builder. Currently building Flyletter, previously sold Selling Signals (100k subscribers). 1 sold, 2 failed, 1 active. This post started as an issue of my weekly newsletter.