Don’t Use Ads to Get Your First Customers

Why ads are toxic to early stage startups

If you just started a company for the first time and you’re using ads to get your first paying customers, you’re doing it wrong. Unless you’re a repeat successful founder, you’ll be out of business in 2 years. I’m sure of it.

I often times post about my opinion on ads via Facebook or LinkedIn and get an emotional response, likely from people using ads themselves. I have a very aggressive stance against using ads to get your first customers because I think ads literally kill companies that could have been great. Here’s why:

You are pre product-market fit

If you just started a company, you are not in the scaling phase yet. You are a lost soul, swimming in the pre-PMF (Product Market Fit) sea, trying to find a sector of customers who will pay you money for what you built, and will continue to pay you money over time. Finding product-market fit is really hard, but the only way to get through it is to talk to potential customers, get their feedback, iterate on your product, ship new code, and go back to the customers. Otherwise called the Lean Methodology.

It’s a process that takes companies years to do, but if you don’t have PMF, you will end up like Homejoy…dead. Homejoy raised…