Introduction
Growth and customer acquisition in start-ups is not a new topic. There are already a huge number of publications, books, blogs, articles and training programs dedicated to the subject.
The challenge as an entrepreneur, therefore, both starting out and battle-hardened, is whom to listen to when there is already so much noise to sift through and what feels like new choices, options and updates emerging on a daily basis. Especially when your success in acquiring customers can often be the difference between the life and death of your business.
As someone with a marketing (LIDA) and advertising (M&C Saatchi), angel investment (Tails.com) and startup (online training) background, I’ve been exploring this topic in detail over the past 15 years. Despite the existing breadth of coverage, I felt there was a distinct lack of straightforward overview of the development of the ‘growth’ discipline post the dot.com boom, as well any efforts to summarise the current strategies, processes and tactics not just available, but actually being used by live start-ups and their growth focused practitioners. I was also fascinated by the emergence of the language around growth, specifically the creation and popularisation of the term ‘growth hacking’, and wanted to explore the debate, both positive and negative, surrounding the term.
With that in mind I decided to focus more deeply on the topic for my Executive MBA dissertation at Imperial College Business School in London, with my research guided by the title:
Understanding growth: A review of how Seed to Series A start-ups in the UK approach customer acquisition
This article is a summary of that research. Whilst not the condensed 1,000-word piece I know many in the marketing and start-up industries would prefer, instead I have gone through the full report and chosen to highlight what I think the key takeouts are without a hard word count constraint. Conscious that I’m working on another major project that I need to invest all my efforts towards, in the words of Mark Twain:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
It’s up to you now to see whether that exercise has been worthwhile — I hope you enjoy the article regardless of its length.
Report aims
The aims of my research and the report were threefold:
- to gain an understanding of the current state of customer acquisition and growth early stage start-ups in the UK;
- to further investigate the ways in which they are approaching customer acquisition and growth, explore how this might evolve in future; and
- determine a set of recommendations for the identified stakeholders.
Who is it for?
I believe this report is of particular relevance to:
- Entrepreneurs (both starting out, and old hands);
- Customer acquisition specialists who work within an early stage UK start-up;
- Investors in early stage UK start-ups; and
- Businesses that play a supporting role in helping start-ups acquire customers.
With the respect of the final category, I think it could be particularly useful to individuals within advertising and marketing agencies, advertising and marketing technology companies, start-up accelerators and incubators and UK trade bodies.
Read the report in full (pretty please)
From what I have observed, we live in an age of limited attention spans. Whilst I would urge you to read the paper in its entirety (my contributors’ did not hold back and their quotes alone are worth the effort!) I appreciate that it is around 20,000 words (including appendices). It’s worth noting that for each ‘Favourite chart’ and ‘Favourite table of responses’ shown below, there are at least 5x more in the actual document covering other areas in much more detail, so worth delving into.
So if you can find the time in what feels like a world where the default setting is now
FULL ON INTENSITY ALL THE TIME
put the kettle on, grab a warm beverage of choice (and hopefully a biscuit), and download the full piece here.
Contributors
Along with a review of the existing literature, I interviewed over 20 people from across the UK start-up ecosystem, from startups to VCs, to growth agency specialists and trade bodies.
A huge thanks to the following for contributing to the research:
- Jeremy Basset, CEO (CO:CUBED)
- Mitch Platt, UK Country Manager (Growth Tribe)
- Les Binet, Head of Effectiveness (adam&eveDDB)
- Rayan Jawad & Paul Finch, Founders (Growth Studio)
- Michele Cuccovillo, Founder (Rockmission)
- Alex Hewson, Head of Performance (M&C Saatchi Performance)
- Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute)
- Charlie Ebdy, Chief Strategy Officer (Vizeum UK)
- Alex Lambropoulos, Head of Growth (Growth Sandwich)
- Curran Dye, Head of Marketing (Feast.it)
- Samit Dutta, Head of Digital Marketing (PlayOJO)
- Toby Cosser, Head of Marketing (Enclothed)
- Alexander Beresford, CMO (Finiata)
- Ben Wynne-Simmons, Head of Growth (Fliplet)
- Jonathan Carrier, VP Corporate Development (AeroMobil)
- James Gibson, Head of Digital Marketing (WeSwap)
- David Arnoux, Head of Growth | Co-Founder (Growth Tribe)
- Parveen Dhanda, Head of Growth (Tech Nation)
- Stephen Millard, Chief Platform Officer (Notion)
- Alex Dunsdon, Partner (SAATCHiNVEST)
Although they were not able to contribute formally, I would like to extend my thanks to Jake Higgins (who really kicked it all off), Tom Roach, Doug Scott, Tom Goodwin, Henry Innis and Dan Hauck for helping with advice, guidance and their abilities to connect me to an amazing group of people.
A diversity failure
Whilst this group was incredibly open and willing to help from the outset, I am still exceptionally disappointed that despite directly contacting 52 people who work in growth and customer acquisition, as well as numerous outreach efforts on LinkedIn and in specific online groups, I was not able to obtain contributions from a more diverse group.
I believe that whilst relatively robust from the Experiential side of difference (i.e. economic or social position, education, occupation, faith, abilities, dependents, caring responsibilities), the research is likely to have missed the mark in a number of areas that I am not even aware of due to its failure to take into account the diversity of thought which may have emerged if I had gained contributions from a group with broader Demographic differences (i.e. age, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical resources). I would however, like to thank Diversity VC and Atomico for their efforts in this space and raising my own consciousness in this area — check out their report on Diversity & Inclusion in Tech.
If I had taken some of their suggestions to heart from the outset (the full report details how I approached contributor recruitment but clearly shows how I did not take into account their recommendations), perhaps I would have achieved a different and more inclusive result overall. With that caveat in mind let’s move on here, but with the best of intentions, without wishing to patronise or appear too woke, please don’t ignore the diversity and inclusion challenges within both your personal and business lives.
The research itself
Overview
The research aimed to cover a few specific areas:
- To understand how customer acquisition is currently approached in the real world;
- to identify specific frameworks, strategies, processes and support required to drive customer acquisition for early stage UK start-ups; and
- to assess how the discipline is likely to evolve in the future.
Objectives
To do this, I developed a number of specific research objectives to cover these challenges:
- Clarify the language and terminology used in the customer acquisition and growth discipline, and assess their suitability going forwards
- Confirm the importance of customer acquisition and growth to early stage start-ups, to understand how important it is as an area of focus
- Identify the frameworks, academic or otherwise, currently in use in the customer acquisition and growth discipline
- Identify how customer acquisition and growth is currently being conducted by early stage UK start-ups, in particular the strategies, process and support they use, and what are the most important factors for success
- Investigate how customer acquisition and growth is likely to evolve, and the trends and innovations that are likely to affect this evolution
Each objective and the subsequent research was covered in the report, with detailed conclusions for each, but I will cover each of them briefly in this article.
Methodology
The process utilised a mixed methodology, with a single phase of research, comprising a literature review, qualitative interviews and an online quantitative survey.
Research process
From a literature review point of view, I reviewed scholarly (peer reviewed) journal literature, books (physical and digital), business publications and news articles, websites of industry trade bodies, articles and blogs, business research and statistics and attended a number of live events.
Whilst the qualitative interviews were a huge success, I think it is safe to say that online quantitative survey was a complete disaster! Only three people completed the survey, so whilst not statistically relevant, it is worth noting that the responses obtained did support the output of the qualitative interviews.
Literature review summary
Whilst there was academic literature available regarding customer acquisition, the vast majority of it focused on large businesses. It was of concern to me that there is so little academic work conducted in this area, and indeed that wider Marketing academic work is not being utilised.
In my (written) interview with Byron Sharp, he commented on the lack of peer reviewed academic work being utilised by the Marketing industry:
“I believe it is much the same in other disciplines, even medicine. Adoption takes time. That said, the idea of looking for serious evidence is new to our discipline. Intuition and anecdote have too much influence.”
Regarding business literature, there was a significant amount available for review, in fact, an enormous number of articles, books and posts written by seasoned practitioners regarding customer acquisition, growth hacking and growth marketing.
However I agree with Mark Ritson, Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Melbourne Business School and columnist in Marketing Week that there are:
“[too many] marketing concepts — some heavenly, some hellish”
The key conclusion was of the literature was the importance of getting the product or service right, achieving ‘product market fit’ (referred to through the report and this article as PMF), which then allows significant efforts to go into other forms of customer acquisition. Marc Andreessen defines the PMF concept as:
“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
The ‘frameworks’ created by practitioners appeared to me to be robust enough to cover many different forms of early stage start-ups. The focus on practical advice like team structures and skillsets gave the impression of a sector focused on practising what it preaches, experimenting and learning from the successful results of peers.
I used the results of the literature review to craft my interview questions, to identify from practitioners of customer acquisition in early stage UK start-ups what literature was in use, for what reasons, and how this literature impacted the strategies, processes and support they deployed to achieve success.
Answering the research questions
1. Clarify the language and terminology used in the customer acquisition and growth discipline, and assess their suitability going forwards
Whilst covered in great detail in the report itself, before I started I spent a significant amount of time assessing the current definitions of the terms ‘customer acquisition’ and ‘growth hacking’ and created the following working definitions to assist with both the literature review and for discussions with all of the interviewees:
Customer acquisition
The sales and marketing process of systematically persuading a new consumer or business to purchase a company’s products or services
Growth hacking
A process of rapid experimentation across marketing funnel, product development, sales segments, and other areas of the business to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business
Summary of findings
It was clear from the interview process that the working definition of customer acquisition was not significantly debated or disagreed with. Sensible and workable suggestions could be easily incorporated into an amended definition. With an updated definition, I could see no reason that this wouldn’t meet with wider peer and industry agreement.
Growth hacking as a term however, emerged as a more debatable topic area with more research potential. Respondents were very passionate on both sides of the argument about the meaning, usefulness and practical application of the term. I believe any updated definitions are likely to be more complex to create (though I have done as you can see later on) and agree within the industry, with a likely split in the terminology required to aid understanding.
Favourite table of responses
Favourite quotes
Les Binet on the concept of ‘acquiring’ customers:
“One is the whole idea of acquiring customers. That this is a sharp divide between being a customer and non-customer. From what we know about businesses where there’s repeat buying, it is that there is no sharp distinction between customers and non-customers. I mean, the only sharp division that exists is between people who’ve never bought the brand before, and people buying it for the first time.”
James Gibson on growth hacking:
“People who aren’t on the front line of this stuff think, let’s do some cool viral guerilla thing. Silver bullets, quick wins, but it’s not that straightforward. It’s not a healthy term.”
2. Confirm the importance of customer acquisition and growth to early stage start-ups, to understand how important it is as an area of focus
The literature review confirmed the view that without creating a product that people want as articulated by Paul Graham of Y Combinator, it would be nearly impossible to achieve the precondition to commencing serious customer acquisition activities, that of confirming PMF:
Sean Ellis’s ‘start-up pyramid’
Summary of findings
The interviews and survey found that whilst customer acquisition was one of the most important activities an early stage start-up could focus on, more important was balancing three key activities:
- Raising sufficient funding
- Building a good product
- Achieving PMF
Favourite chart
Favourite table of responses
Favourite quotes
Rayan Jawad and Paul Finch on the importance of customer acquisition:
“At the [Seed] stage, it’s a 5 for them, but only because they believe it is a 5. The actual priority is about validation, getting traction (which might not be acquisition), demonstrating with confidence there is a need in the market. They are not always ready to acquire customers [and doing so too early] can have significantly negative consequences in the long run. At [Series A] scale-up stage, customer acquisition is much more important.”
Ben Wynne-Simmons on PMF:
“I care a lot about Product/Market fit. Does [our product] fit the customers we found…I look at the product as much as outbound [customer acquisition] as a way to acquire customers…the best way of getting people to buy your product is recommendation. So, you have to make sure your existing customers have an amazing experience [with your product or service].”
3. Identify the frameworks, academic or otherwise, currently in use in the customer acquisition and growth discipline
This section focused on identifying which customer acquisition frameworks were actually being used by practitioners within early stage start-ups and their supporting ecosystem. The findings also compared and contrasted these responses against the literature review conducted.
Summary of findings
Respondents from all categories of stakeholders outlined their preference for the use of formal frameworks when considering customer acquisition activities, albeit only slightly. Academic frameworks were roundly criticized and hardly utilised.
Respondents outlined a number of frameworks in current use across all stakeholder categories to direct their customer acquisition activities, with different frameworks suited to different goals. The most frequently mentioned of these however, were notable for their attempts to follow a more scientific approach. A minority of respondents had developed their own frameworks based on previous experience.
Favourite table of responses
Favourite chart
Favourite quotes
Jeremy Basset on the secrecy surrounding frameworks:
“It’s such a competitive advantage having a framework that works for you, you don’t want to tell people about it. Realising there is an opportunity in the market, if the secret is out, the efficiencies disappear, irrespective of whether you are competition with a company or not. If you are targeting the same audience, even if you have different products, you lose that efficiency”.
Rayan Jawad and Paul Finch on academic frameworks:
“Academic frameworks don’t work, there are too many distinct factors that impact them, they don’t survive ‘first contact’. The application of a framework is always very bespoke. You have to compromise at some level, because frameworks work on too many assumptions on things that start-ups just don’t have. They just don’t apply [in the real world]”.
Alexander Beresford on bias:
“What works in London or New York, doesn’t necessarily work in Poland, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. [Customer acquisition] knowledge and examples are heavily skewed towards the ‘West’.”
4. Identify how customer acquisition and growth is currently being conducted by early stage UK start-ups, in particular the strategies, process and support they use, and what are the most important factors for success
This section focused on responses which discussed the practical realities of conducting customer acquisition activities in early stage start-ups, but also focused on what practitioners believe are the most important factors which drive success.
The two key factors that significantly affected the responses regarding strategies, processes and support were:
1) Maturity
- Pre-seed / Seed companies (and companies that support them)
- Seed / Series A companies (and companies that support them)
2) Macro audience
- B2C
- B2B
Summary of findings
This section observed the widest variety of responses of any of the research questions.
From a strategy perspective, respondents were clear that these were very much dependent on a number of factors identified in the research limitations detailed later in this article, but in particular company maturity, their target audience and the complexity of the product. In many cases, a distinct lack of strategy emerged, or at the very least one that was constantly evolving with a short-term focus, especially due to the time constraints (and ultimately pressure) put on early stage start-ups by external investors.
Tactics and techniques were very much focused on which specific media channels were used. B2C companies focused predominantly on digital media, expanding into traditional media as scale allowed. B2B companies focused on outbound sales teams operating in a digital environment, as well as relying on referrals. Both groups were concerned about channel bias within their start-ups. An overreliance on Facebook and Google advertising products was clear.
A distinct lack of a customer acquisition process was common across stakeholder groups, and whilst weekly reporting was common, a formal process was often seen as an inevitable outcome of scaling and not necessary until then.
Regarding support, from a technology perspective, the majority of start-ups utilise a Google based technology stack, with their software focus on digital tracking and analytics solutions to measure and attribute their activities. From a team perspective, individuals or teams of two were common in the Seed stage, and teams of three to five in Series A, with a preference for multi-disciplinary skillsets. In both stages, shared resource was a common concern, especially regarding software engineers or developers to assist with customer acquisition experiments.
From an agency / agency’s perspective, there was a strong preference for early stage start-ups to avoid utilising them, unless they could work in-house, or had very specific domain expertise that was required, but only until it could be in-housed permanently.
The most important success factors (including indirect factors not explicitly related to customer acquisition) focused on ensuring early stage start-ups had a great product or service. Secondary factors included being organised and having a process, a clear and consistent brand, as well as a robust tracking and attribution solution.
Favourite table of responses (on strategy)
Favourite table of responses (on tactics and techniques)
Favourite table of responses (on processes and practices)
Favourite table of responses (on team structure)
Favourite table (on success factors for customer acquisition)
Favourite quotes
Ben Wynne-Simmons on product education:
“People aren’t searching for us, we’re a mobile app development platform. [They] don’t know what Fliplet is. They know what a banana is”.
Alex Dunsdon on Facebook advertising:
“Facebook has been the greatest gift [to start-ups]. You can be terrible at marketing, but you have this amazing targeting machine, it forgives many things.”
And Alex on the ideal start-up marketer:
“One person can do it. Data driven hacky types, multi skilled, who understand people. But they are really rare. They know how to move someone from A to B. They have the skills to construct and optimise that journey. You need a huge toolkit as well as specialised skills, a start-up Marketing Director is the hardest job in the world”.
David Arnoux on start-ups using growth agencies:
“[It’s] very odd that start-ups are still outsourcing distribution and tone of voice, seems to be a UK thing, a cultural thing. It’s not the case in the rest of Europe. You lose access to your data. Agencies don’t work in an experiment-based approach. It’s £30k and weeks to try some landing pages [with an agency], or half a day with your own team.”
James Gibson on channel bias:
“Be honest with yourself. It’s too easy to convince yourself a certain channel is doing well. You can easily spin the numbers. Test things, if it doesn’t work, move on. It doesn’t happen enough.”
5. Investigate how customer acquisition and growth is likely to evolve, and the trends and innovations that are likely to affect this evolution
This section focused on responses about the future of customer acquisition from a practitioner’s perspective, through three questions posed to the interviewees.
Summary of findings
The research found that the future and evolution of customer acquisition is up for significant debate. A large number of potential avenues for developments in the discipline were discussed across the stakeholder categories. Predictive marketing, accurate attribution models and creative development automation were seen as the most pivotal developments for customer acquisition in the future.
There was limited discussion regarding new terminology, with high levels of scepticism and cynicism about certain areas of focus, and to a degree many developments were regarded as ‘the emperor’s new clothes’. There was a perception that the speed of change in the industry makes it difficult to make any firm predictions. Finally, the use of artificial intelligence (specifically machine learning), was perceived as more likely to augment, rather than replace, humans within the customer acquisition discipline.
Favourite table (on emerging strategies, tactics and techniques)
Favourite table of responses (on what will reduce in importance*)
* I strongly disagree that offline advertising will reduce in importance!
Favourite quotes
Curran Dye on new terminology:
“[Before growth hacking] we didn’t really have growth marketers. Growth is just a nice shiny new name for what people have been doing forever. Improving growth frameworks, processes and specific strategies and tactics has been the focus over the past five years.”
Alexander Beresford on artificial intelligence:
“Humans will become statistically augmented. But we won’t use humans to make every decision”.
Report recommendations
Language and terminology
An update to the working definition of customer acquisition was recommended in the report:
“The process of engaging with new consumer or business so that they a) signal interest in a company or b) purchase a company’s products or services”
By removing the constraints imposed by specifying which departments, teams or individuals (i.e. sales and marketing) are involved in the process, the revised definition recognises that customer acquisition is everyone’s problem, not just a challenge for a specific department, team or individual.
The words ‘systematically’ and ‘persuasion’ were also removed, as the use of the word ‘process’ already implied a systematic approach, and it was shown that persuasion was only one option of many to acquire customers. Finally, the updated definition highlighted that customer acquisition has two aspects, one focused on establishing customer interest by achieving a level of commitment (signalling interest in a company), one focused on customer purchase to achieve revenue.
Major amends were recommended to the definition of growth hacking to achieve wider agreement in the industry. In fact, it was recommended that the term growth hacking was replaced with ‘growth experimentation’ and given the following definition:
“a process of rapid experimentation to identify the most effective and efficient ways to grow a business”
By removing specific areas of the business, the updated definition acknowledged that what is important is the process of rapid experimentation, irrespective of the business area. The word ‘effective’ was added, as efficiency on its own is not sufficient to achieve business growth. I think it unlikely that re-naming and re-framing the definition will achieve widespread approval, apart from perhaps with a more cynical UK audience.
While the concept of growth marketing was discussed throughout the report, no specific definition was utilised. There are strong arguments that the term does not require any additional clarification to distinguish the term from current definitions of Marketing when considering the wider context of the more established 7P’s. With this in mind, but cognisant that it is a term in use, if not necessarily useful, I created the following growth marketing definition based on the CIM’s original definition of marketing:
“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements in an early stage start-up, utilising a process of rapid experimentation.”
My definition made clear that growth marketing is only relevant to an early stage start-up, making it time limited, but acknowledged that the concept of rapid experimentation derived from growth hacking plays a key role at this time in businesses lifecycle. It also removed the idea of profitability from the process. As has been discussed here and is well known from the likes of UBER, Tesla and Spotify, profitability is not always a requirement during the early stages of a start-up.
Focus limited resources
Whilst it was established that Customer Acquisition is incredibly important to early stage start-ups, it was also shown that it is not the be all and end all for most businesses. The research clearly indicated that before an early stage start-up pours their limited resources into acquiring customers as their primary focus, they must first ensure they have invested a balance of resources in the following:
- Product
- Product / Market fit
- Funding
Without a sufficient and stable product, any Customer Acquisition efforts will have been for naught. Whilst some effort is needed to be put into Customer Acquisition to obtain enough customers to generate data to allowing testing to establish whether Product / Market Fit has been achieved, it should not be over-prioritised at the expense of deriving learnings from these customers to improve the product, before investing significantly in Customer Acquisition. With this in mind, investment will likely need to be raised in parallel to provide the funds to allow and accelerate the Customer Acquisition process once Product / Market Fit has been confirmed.
Customer acquisition frameworks
Both the literature review and the primary research in the report uncovered a number of different usable frameworks. It was clear that frameworks that are useful to very early stage start-ups (Pre-Seed to Seed) and early stage start-ups (Seed to Series A) have some overlaps, but do not always apply to both.
The recommendation in the report was to use as few frameworks as possible but as many as necessary. The following specific frameworks were recommended to be used in a near linear and overlapping fashion as supporting tools for a start-up’s own internal process:
To achieve product / market fit:
To map the marketing funnel:
To generate ideas and experiment rapidly:
If relevant for the product or service:
Alexander Beresford had a parting comment regarding the use of frameworks that I believe should always be considered before relying on them:
“[Frameworks] are supposed to be supporting tools for thought process, but too often used as decision tools, especially in start-ups. Don’t make that mistake.”
Strategies, process and support
If the research showed anything, it was that answers on which specific strategies, processes and support that an early stage start-up should utilise are hugely varied, with the major contributing factors that impact customer acquisition activities shown below:
Factors affecting customer acquisition strategies, processes and support
I found it was possible however, to provide some general recommendations that applied irrespective of these contributory factors, but it is clear that additional research is desirable to make these recommendations more specific:
Strategies, tactics and techniques
Have an overall strategy for customer acquisition, and be able to clearly articulate and circulate it;
- Ensure it has short-term and long-term goals;
Be prepared to evolve the strategy based on evidence generated from the customer acquisition strategies;
- Remove channel bias at all costs;
Consider alternatives to Facebook and Search advertising, especially if the start-up is reliant on them, they may not be affordable forever;
Clear and consistent brand activity and messaging, especially outside of customer acquisition activities, is crucial.
Process and practices
Simply having a process is good (with options outlined in the Recommendations above regarding frameworks to utilise), but ensure it is managed and optimised, and the results generated (successful or not) are reported on a consistent, regular basis, without blame or bias.
Technology
Ensure that the start-up’s focus on software purchases takes the following into consideration:
- Accurate attribution is everything, ensure the start-up invests in appropriate tracking and analytics software for the business;
- Ensure whatever software is purchased can be easily integrated with other pieces of key software to enable accurate data sharing between them;
- Google has the largest single set of integrated and relevant advertising and marketing software for an early stage start-up.
Team
Finding a start-up Marketing Director who has all of the necessary skills to conduct growth marketing without additional support would be ideal. However, an internal team of two people is a more realistic ambition. Preferably hire at least one person with proven experience in taking an early stage start-up from Seed to Series A.
In addition, ensure that the start-up has sufficient software engineering or developer resource to integrate, operate and optimise any experiments, and an agreed process for requesting, obtaining and prioritising sufficient amounts of shared resource in design and copywriting.
Agencies
Unless absolutely necessary, avoid agencies as an early stage start-up.
Instead, focus on expanding your start-up’s professional network, with freelancers to assist with specific jobs working in-house, as well as in areas that the start-up will need to hire in specific customer acquisition expertise at a later date.
Managing the future
In the words of Jeff Bezos in one of his annual letters to shareholders:
“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”
Whilst they cannot be guaranteed in any way, the following recommendations are built around what is unlikely to change, as much as what is a possibility:
- Ensure the start-up’s attribution methodology and output is robust;
- Be open to testing new channels (media or otherwise), ideas and technologies within an agreed framework;
- Reduce reliance on traditional SEO and content techniques, simply make sure the start-up continues to be relevant and influential to the target audience;
- Spend time considering the implications of widespread privacy concerns, especially with the major social media platforms, and the impact this may have on the start-up’s customer acquisition strategy;
- Experiment with machine learning and more complex AI tools to assist, support and supercharge the start-up’s existing team, particularly across, creative development automation and predictive marketing opportunities;
- Don’t discount traditional media channels, especially to scale significantly.
My conclusions
The report sought to understand how growth takes place in early stage UK start-ups. It reviewed the perspectives of Seed to Series A start-ups and the companies that invest and support them, to widen industry knowledge in how to improve customer acquisition activities.
I found that definitions in the customer acquisition discipline were outdated, and I provided recommendations of updates, as well as new definitions. I reviewed the available literature on customer acquisition and growth frameworks available to early stage start-ups and found whilst academia was lacking directly relevant literature, the business and practitioner world had made up for it with quantity, if not always quality. I recommended a number of practitioner frameworks to assist with planning and executing customer acquisition activities.
I found that strategies, processes and support vary hugely between different early stage start-ups, which is due to a wide variety of different internal and external factors. Of particular importance, was that limited early stage start-up resources were often incorrectly focused on acquiring customers before their product had achieved PMF, and recommended that they concentrate on this until achieved.
With this in mind, I provided a series of general recommendations that could apply to all early stage start-ups, with a significant caveat that further, more specific research should be conducted.
I considered the future of the customer acquisition discipline, and found that whilst the tactics continued to evolve, the fundamentals remained stable. I recommended that innovation in the customer acquisition discipline can be well handled due to its inherently experimental nature and robust methodologies to review and test trends, new ideas and technologies.
Implications for different stakeholders
Early stage start-ups
The report provided a broad overview of the customer acquisition and growth discipline, which showed that the industry has an active and engaged group of advisors who are constantly seeking to improve how the start-up community conducts their customer acquisition activities.
It highlighted that whilst there are some general learnings and recommendations that can be followed, there will be specific customer acquisition knowledge for a start-up that can only be obtained through the practical application of the strategies, tactics and techniques covered.
Finally, that to prioritise customer acquisition too far in advance of PMF is not recommended and to be avoided at all costs.
Investors
It became clear when conducting the research that many early stage start-ups are under significant pressure from their investors to hit milestones, often (in their view) to the detriment of the business by satisfying the short term at the expense of the long term.
Investors should be wary of putting too much pressure on start-ups, but also consider whether a ‘platform’ investing approach (i.e. where comprehensive support as well as funding is provided) or providing access to appropriate advisors and mentors would be an option for consideration to ensure start-up staff have appropriate training and education on customer acquisition at all stages of the business, from initial concept through to scaling.
Companies that support early stage start-ups
The report provided a cautionary warning to agencies, in particular traditional marketing and advertising ones, that the majority of marketing activities (which incorporate customer acquisition) are now run inhouse in both early stage start-ups and those that are beginning to scale.
There appeared to be a time limited window where an external agency is able to assist an early stage UK start-up, which could be said to be taking advantage of a cultural preference which appears now to be shifting (and not in their favour). These companies could seek to pivot their business models to some degree, with initial thoughts to either helping to train early stage start-ups, advise them in conjunction with investors (and with their financial support), or provide inhouse services onsite rather than externally.
Not enough information was gathered on accelerators, incubators or the advertising and marketing software industry to allow for any robust empirically based recommendations or conclusions.
For trade bodies, the report highlighted that an impartial and unbiased source of practical and proven customer acquisition and growth information (especially regarding actual costs) would be a very useful resource for early stage start-ups in the UK.
Limitations of this research
The report, whilst relatively comprehensive, should only be viewed as an overview of the current state of the customer acquisition discipline at the time of writing (end 2018).
The report goes into more detail in a specific research critique section, but I believed the following data limitations and methodology critiques were worth highlighting and documenting:
- Sample size and interview characteristics
- Response consistency due to semi-structured interviews
- Number of survey respondents
- Access to certain groups (e.g. venture capitalists)
- Time (spent on the report)
- Reliability and interviewee bias
A key theme that emerged throughout the research was the significance of the impact different factors, both internal and external to an early stage start-up, can have on how they should approach and succeed in customer acquisition and growth for that specific business.
I believe that addressing the impact of the multitude of factors identified (shown again below) would have had the most significant impact on the report’s findings and recommendations.
Factors affecting customer acquisition strategies, processes and support
Finally, the report was perhaps too ambitious in its scope, especially regarding the amount of data gathered through primary research phase and the challenges of integrating this sufficiently within the boundaries of the report framework — largely the word count!
Future research
I believe any future research would need to incorporate a much larger set of interview and survey respondents from all stakeholder categories. The impact of the different contributory factors affecting customer acquisition activities could then have been measured, and a much more substantial dataset gathered for analysis.
Another option would be to analyse past data from the start-up investment community. Both Seed and Series A start-ups report their customer acquisition and growth numbers on a quarterly basis to their investors. There is likely to be a large number of separate datasets that cover acquisition and growth metrics within each venture capital firm that invests in early stage UK start-ups. If this could be pooled and anonymised, insights could be drawn across sectors, industries, maturities, audiences and business models.
The literature review did not cover the existing customer acquisition literature in great detail, due to the majority reviewed being so focused on large businesses. Future research could re-review this literature and compare historic findings with the current literature to observe the similarities and differences.
A geographic or regional study could also be conducted, to see if the same findings and recommendations apply. Of more interest however, would be to do comparisons against significantly different geographies (China, Africa or non-English speaking countries) to understand if the predominantly Silicon Valley focused narrative and recommendations still apply.
As the authors of Traction observed, whilst they identified 19 channels to experiment with, each of those channels was exceptionally broad. A future study could more closely examine each of them, to better articulate the nuances and provide more detail on how to succeed within each. Indeed, I found more than 19 potential channels, as shown below:
B2C and B2B media channel options (author’s attempt at full coverage)
Finally, a common request post interview was to have a universal benchmarking tool to understand the realities of acquisition cost across sectors, geographies and media channels. Whilst acquisition costs are relatively easy to obtain (if you know where to look), there is still not a universal set of benchmarks for early stage start-ups to access to improve their acquisition cost modelling attempts whilst constructing their business plans.
The end (and some post report hindsight)
I hope you found it a useful read, and that you are able to use some recommendations in the real world. Now I’ve had a few months to consider the research and the final report, I thought it useful to highlight the following now I have the benefit of hindsight.
1) It’s a good summary, but …
If I am being honest, I ran out of words, time and quite frankly enthusiasm (it was a long two years!) to develop detailed thoughts on the frameworks examined, propose anything hugely radical, or challenge the existing thinking to the degree I was hoping to.
A missed opportunity that I’m going to try to address by using the recommendations in my own start-up, though I would love to revisit some of the themes at a later date.
2) I missed out by not looking far back enough
I didn’t really dig deep enough into older, properly researched marketing theories and their applicability to the start-up world. I skimmed the surface of these in my literature review, found a huge amount of relevant peer reviewed work, and then simply had too wide a scope to really look into it in detail. The link between Growth and traditional definitions of Marketing however, was glaring.
I haven’t got a traditional marketing background or degree, and I’m hugely conscious that this lack of formal training means that I’m sure there are some absolute givens and laws that I should have spent more time researching and bringing into the final output.
I personally plan on spending as much time as possible revisiting these areas, particularly the evidenced based marketing approach advocated by Binet, Field, Ritson, Sharp and Roach that still rather oddly doesn’t seem to known or utilised by enough industry practitioners in the start-up world (let alone in the advertising and marketing community).
3) I didn’t get close to solving the brand / performance investment debate
In hindsight, subconsciously I really wanted the research to surface a definitive answer as to how start-ups should tackle the challenge of how best to justify spend on brand advertising in a world where performance advertising is king. This is now an immediate challenge for the new project I am working on, so a bit gutted that I don’t have the answer!
I don’t believe I found a silver bullet to convince investors (and in particular the more aggressive venture capitalists investing in B2C businesses) that when start-up funds are limited, brand advertising investment is just as important as the current in-vogue tactic of just dumping all their investors money into Facebook’s suite of advertising products and Google’s search and display suite.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s work is worth considering if you would like to explore this area in more detail, especially their seminal work ‘The Long and the Short of It’.
4) The output is very B2C focused
Perhaps someone else can follow up this work with a B2B slant, as from the discussions I did have, the literature, practical advice, specialists to speak to and expertise on how start-ups can best balance sales and marketing activities with limited resources continue to be disappointingly thin on the ground. I applaud Stephen Millard and the platform team at Notion for their work in this area — they are way ahead of the game from what I can see.
5) I really like two books I’ve found since
I’ve subsequently been given two books that focus on Product / Market Fit that I would also highly recommend:
6) Initial comments from growth experts
As you can imagine, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations since completing the report last year about some of my findings, not least with people at both growth agencies and growth specialists beyond my original interviewee set that I have spoken to since completing the research.
A common refrain has been that to come to some of the conclusions I have around the word ‘Growth’, I simply don’t understand what it means. From patronising to downright aggressive, people who work in Growth seem to feel very strongly that it is distinct and separate discipline in its own right — far removed from previous explanations drawn from within the existing marketing literature.
I think I can safely say now, having invested in and advised startups with a huge focus on acquisition over the past 15 years, run growth for a startup, run marketing for a SME, launched a number of consumer startups with M&C Saatchi, managed both growth and product teams on behalf of clients, and having a conducted extensive primary and secondary research specifically about growth — I get it :)
Growth, and the concept of Growth teams and especially the rigour of their experimental processes across functions have been a huge part of the success of many startups across the world. For me personally, there is little debate about this, though I appreciate others disagree.
Much to many people’s surprise, I don’t really have an issue with anyone using the word Growth, despite my personal preference against the term. In fact, bizarrely, I currently encourage it as I believe the word Growth fosters a positive cultural change within a business (especially large businesses) to focus on overall business growth irrespective of the operational area, beyond customer acquisition and far beyond simply communications and more specifically brand and performance marketing. In much the same way that I understand Disney deliberate call their customers ‘Guests’ — the impact of language upon a business culture should not be underestimated.
But we need to be realistic. Growth as a term only exists because of a failure of Marketing itself. Whilst likes on Twitter don’t necessarily mean endorsement, it appears that Sean Ellis agrees with me:
Let me explain why I believe there are issues with Marketing and a few pieces of evidence.
There are less than 3% of board members who are marketers. Hoffmire is right — if marketing were valued at the board level, there would be more marketers on boards.
2) Marketers do not have the professional qualifications of their peers in Accounting, Law or Finance:
“More than half of marketers (53.8%) say they have not studied a marketing-related academic or professional qualification of any kind.”
“I would love marketers to finally get in the front of the making process, to use data, creativity, imagination and empathy to inform what we make, the 4Ps of marketing include product, price, place and we’ve become comms folk, a small part of one P.”
I believe because of these issues, it has led to a (deserved) decline in respect for the Marketing discipline, if you can even still call a discipline (perhaps a step too far).
“…in a separate study among board members, only 4% believe that marketing is an important experience to have (versus 47% who believe that finance is).”
People can just make things up, and they stick, because there are limited opportunities for anyone to stop them. This year at Cannes, there was an epidemic of bullshit and buzzwords from even the most senior marketers.
I personally think this has happened with Growth (and especially growth hacking) to a degree is that it has run away with people’s imaginations, even though it is not really deserved considering how successful it has been. Some mentioned that Disciplines do split, and perhaps that is happening with Marketing and Growth. To that I say, hmmm perhaps, though definitions of Marketing and Growth’s remits are all but identical, but there rarely seems to be much point in splitting disciplines unnecessarily.
‘Digital’ is a great example. How many advertising or marketing agencies still exist that purely describe themselves in digital terms only? Whilst big corporates are lagging behind even them, how many companies still have a Head of Digital? The split will be all but forgotten in 5 years:
The vast majority of people I spoke in my primary research remained neutral about the term Growth — it is simple a known and well understood means to an end in the startup world. There was considerably less love shown towards it than I expected (and even less for growth hacking).
However, if you go back (as I did as part of my literature review) and re-examine the history and development of Marketing, it tells a different story. However many P’s you want, 4 or 7, every description of Growth I could find simply matches traditional descriptions of what Marketing is ‘meant’ to do very very closely. I can imagine that the beginnings of many large companies that now practice Marketing properly began as growth teams simply through a lack of resources — just like today’s start-ups. I’d love someone else to research the original marketing teams of big corporates from 1900 to 2000 to see how they started out to confirm this.
I think it speaks volumes that the only people that spoke passionately in defence of Growth were those who had a vested interest in it continuing to be a ‘thing’ in its own right — either by selling growth related services (the majority), or through keeping the broad role and level of responsibility that a Growth title provides (the minority). By giving something the ‘Emperors New Clothes’, there is a financial incentive to benefit from a repackaging of existing knowledge and selling it to unsophisticated clients and markets.
Dependent on whether your livelihood depends on it, I’m not sure it makes a huge difference for most people in the industry. Growth has given Marketing greater prominence in some of the world’s largest startups that have made the transition from searching for a business model to profitable growth in the long run. That can only be a good thing. Everyone in the industry wins in the long run if Growth enables Marketing to reassume its former position at the top table of businesses.
But to claim Growth is a huge leap from what has gone before is disingenuous at best, and not in the interest of the wider Marketing industry and level of respect it needs to regain to really matter after quite a long (and in my opinion deserved) time in the wilderness. We need to learn the mistakes from the past if Marketing is to have a secure and profitable future.
Thank you + get in touch
Fin.
You made it this far, thanks for sticking with it.
I hope it proves a useful resource for you both now and in the future.
Find me on LinkedIn and or my website if you have any questions or queries, or if you want to know what I am up to next, take a look a Project Automobility and subscribe to our updates.
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Credits for this article
‘The Struggle’ refers to the seminal chapter in Ben Horowitz’s famous book about start-ups titled ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’.
Start-up books image shown in the introduction is taken from Matt Smith’s Medium article — The 18 Best Startup/Business Books I Have Read This Year
The credit really goes to everyone I spoke to and the work everyone else has done in this sector that I was able to build on. Thanks again to them. If I have missed anyone out, do let me know.
Reading list
Whilst I didn’t use every reference in this article, I have included the full list of literature I utilised during the full report below as I thought it would be a useful resource.
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