MKT1 Guide to Channel <> Startup fit
MKT1 Guide to Channel <> Startup fit
Debunking the myth of the one channel strategy
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There’s a myth that circulates through the startup halls—across newsletters, podcasts, panels, VC chats, LinkedIn: “Most successful startups use 1 primary channel to drive growth.” I’d argue this is a misleading oversimplification. See the debate here on LI.
I believe it only seems this way. I think this myth is primarily driven by crappy attribution, revisionist history, the desire for clean sound bites on startup growth, a few outlier companies where this was actually the case, and a misunderstanding of marketing. It’s simply not what I’ve seen when I’ve gone deep under the hood at startups.
In my experience, one channel won’t get the job done. You need to approach growth strategy like building a basketball team (excuse the sports metaphor). The players are your growth channels and you need to assemble a basketball team of channels to drive revenue growth most effectively. The highest-scoring player might get most of the credit, but there’s always more to the story–the player leading in assists, the player that got all the rebounds, etc. Basketball teams need to be ready for one player to get injured or to make a trade.
In marketing, you need to be prepared too: some channels may not work for every audience segment, some channels may see diminishing returns as you scale, and others may stop working entirely.
No, I’m not advocating you lose focus and try 5 channels at once. You need to pick channels that are a fit for your startup–based on your specific strategy inputs (especially your audience & marketing). You need to continue to test, scale, and optimize multiple channels over a startup’s lifetime.
That said, I never recommend relying too heavily on one channel. Layering multiple channels together over time is the most defensible strategy, especially as “engines” and channels are changing rapidly due to AI and automation.
In this newsletter…
This newsletter covers how to choose the right “engines” aka high-level growth channels–and how to use them together to maximize impact.
Overview of the 5 top-of-funnel growth engines: Inbound, Outbound, Product Virality, Events, and Ecosystem.
Which engines are the best fit for which types of startups
How to layer in other channels to create an even more efficient and effective growth machine, with examples
Mistakes to avoid and how these engines are evolving given AI & automation
Recommended products and agencies
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Event: Showcase - My Favorite Products of 2024
By popular demand we are back with another product showcase. 5 startups will show off their products for marketers. I’ve handpicked a few of my favorite startups of 2024 to join us. Each startup will give a live demo of their product, then answer questions. Just in time to make last minute budget requests for valuable tools for 2025...
This will be recorded and sent to all registrants, so RSVP even if you haven’t nailed down your Dec schedule!
Section 1: Choosing the right engine(s)
I use 5 engine buckets to categorize all of the top-of-funnel growth channels available: inbound, outbound, product virality, events, and ecosystem. You may use different buckets, but I’ve found this is the easiest way to group things! Most of these engines have both organic methods (owned and/or earned) and paid methods, but that’s a whole other newsletter!
Note: This list does not include Lifecycle Marketing, which is another viable growth channel, but not for top of funnel (unless you use it to drive virality).
Comparison table of growth engines
This table gives you an overview of how I define each “engine”, what startup each is best-suited for, caveats for each, and how these engines are changing due to AI and automation, plus examples.
For a deeper dive into each growth "engine”, scroll on down to Section 3 and you’ll find more details than you probably want on each (I went a bit overboard…as usual).
Section 2: Channel pairings
While you may have a primary engine, combining engines and channels that reinforce and accelerate each other is the safest and most viable path to startup growth—especially given the speed at which marketing is changing due to modern tools and how prospects consume information and buy products.
Review this list of 10 pairings to find the engine pairing equivalent of peanut butter and jelly, salsa and guac, wine and cheese, beer and pretzels, etc. for your startup (Yes, I’m hungry right now while on a flight somewhere over the middle of America):
🛝 Inbound & 📩 Outbound
Approach 1: Use inbound content to attract and nurture leads, then follow up with targeted outbound outreach to high-intent web visitors. For example, engage content visitors from SEO with email or LinkedIn outreach to provide a more personalized experience and push them toward a conversion.
Approach 2: Use outbound to reach your top-tier accounts that you’ve co-identified with sales as part of an ABM (account-based marketing strategy) and rely on inbound for SMB & MM prospects.
Common mistakes: Lack of integration between inbound and outbound efforts (especially when siloed in marketing and sales respectively) can confuse and annoy leads.
Example - Snowflake: Snowflake has a highly-talked about ABM program: they identify key accounts and engage them with personalized outbound campaigns. But, they also spend a lot of energy on inbound content—especially for smaller accounts—including technical blogs on topics like certification preparation, data migration, and best practices, along with educational resources including instructor-led classes and on-demand courses.
🛝 Inbound & 🦠 Product Virality
Approach: Use inbound content to drive initial interest, then leverage viral product features to encourage users to invite others.
Common mistakes: You can overspend (both time & money) on organic and paid inbound, thinking product virality when you haven’t yet proved that at scale. So make sure you also focus on in-product growth tactics to drive adoption, retention and clear viral loops.
Example - Dropbox. Dropbox attracted users through inbound content and incentivized them to refer others with their famous referral program.
🛝 Inbound & 📅 Events
Approach: When users come inbound, especially if you have a sales-led GTM motion, offer a “shallower” conversion event in the form of a webinar showing the product without requiring a 1:1 meeting. You can also use webinars as CTAs on content.
Common mistakes: If you have too many CTAs on your website, visitors might get confused. You can even cannibalize high-value conversions by adding an event link when people might have been ready to purchase or request a meeting. My rule of thumb: leave the homepage hero focus on your primary CTA, add event links to landing pages and below the fold.
Example: Ahrefs is known for their inbound & SEO strategy, which makes sense given they are a product for SEO. But, they also use events. Their blog and YouTube channel have high-quality educational content (that I often refer to), and once these leads visit their site they often get invited to webinars and events (like this one). These events show off advanced product features and real-world use cases.
🛝 Inbound & 🪸 Ecosystem
Approach: Create content with partners, and amplify by sharing on each other’s social channels.
Approach 1 : Referral traffic is at the intersection of inbound and ecosystem. So you can do interviews, case studies, webinars, etc with partners that will be posted on their sites. You’ll reach their audience, and link them over to your site driving more inbound.
Approach 2: You can reverse approach 1 too, and use partners, guests, and influencers in your content so they share it on social naturally.
Common mistakes: Before partnering, make sure the companies or individuals you partner with are capable of upholding their end of the deal, have similar ICPS, and have similar brand values and quality standards. Another mistake: thinking partners will automatically share any content you create together. Make sure that’s part of the upfront alignment conversations!
Example: Zapier creates programmatic SEO content for every integration pairing on their site (think Asana + Google Docs) and often the featured startups link to this on their integrations page (if they don’t offer a native integration) or even share this content with their users to help them get more value out of their product.
📩 Outbound & 🦠 Product Virality
Approach: Use outbound to reach out to large accounts who you think will drive high product virality. Offer them a trial to help them land and then use lifecycle marketing to help expand within their organization–and beyond with partners and their ecosystem.
Common mistakes: Dedicating headcount to the outbound portion of this, without having a product that’s actually viral! Make sure you finesse the product’s viral loops and ability to get companies to land and expand without doubling down on expensive top-of-funnel efforts here.
Example: Zoom is an extremely viral product, with a network effect that makes the product more valuable with each new user. But instead of relying on this alone, they use outbound to reach enterprises and drive expansion.
📩 Outbound & 📅 Events
Approach: Reach out to specific accounts via outbound email and invite them to events–whether webinars hosted by you or side events at major conferences. This helps both channels be more successful. Outbound is best when you can offer something valuable (beyond just asking for a 1:1 meeting right away) and events are only worthwhile if you get the right people there.
Common mistakes: Overloading leads with event invitations–especially when the events or interactions are of low quality. Make sure you invite top prospects to events that are great!
Example: Gong targets B2B sales leaders through personalized, data-driven outbound, but instead of always using a 1:1 meeting with sales as a CTA, they use event registration as a lighteweight CTA.
📩 Outbound & 🪸 Ecosystem
Approach 1: Collaborate with ecosystem partners to identify target accounts and gain warm introductions, then follow up with outbound communication (or better yet have them do the outbound communication with you cc’ed).
Approach 2: You can use tools like Clay automatically enrich your list with technology stack data, allowing you to filter and target companies based on the tools they’re already using. (e.g., identifying companies that use Salesforce, HubSpot, or Stripe)
Common mistakes: Overloading ecosystem partners with demands, especially if you can’t deliver real value for these prospects.
Example: Segment connects customer data from many sources, so it makes tons of sense to use ecosystem to drive growth. Their outbound marketing targets companies looking to centralize data and references the tools prospects already use for easy integration.
🦠 Product Virality & 📅 Events
Approach 1: If your product has high virality (either within organizations or across organizations), invite users you think have a high likelihood to share your product to a customer event. Make them feel special so they are even more inclined to share!
Approach 2: Offer regular webinars for existing customers that show off your best features–espeically those that drive product virality.
Common mistakes: Pushing too hard on valuable customers to share. You want this process to feel natural so don’t overdo it, you dont want to lose that amazing customer.
Example: Notion invites high-value users to exclusive gatherings, which encourages them to share the product. (Note: I’ve never been invited, but I’m not offended as I’m team Asana + Google Docs). They also host regular webinars for users highlighting their collaborative features, which promotes sharing the product.
🦠 Product Virality & 🪸 Ecosystem
Approach: If a certain type of ecosystem partner (like service providers) are driving growth already, build a product experience that helps them manage their clients and their client’s use of the product. Imagine a dashboard consolidating accounting information for all of an accountant’s clients for instance. This drives a network effect, where every user can hep you acquire another ecosystem partner, and ecosystem partners in turn drive more customer growth.
Common mistakes: Often product and marketing teams spend so much time thinking about direct sales, they miss these opportunities to enable ecosystem growth. If you have network effect potential through your ecosystem partners, don’t sleep on it–it’s a super powerful combination.
Example: AngelList effectively connects startups and investors, and creates a network effect between all participants in the startup ecosystem. Startups can use AngelList to fundraise, those same investors can they use AngelList to manage their angel investing or fund portfolio.
📅 Events & 🪸 Ecosystem
Approach: Co-host events with ecosystem partners to attract broader audiences and leverage both networks. For instance, do a joint event for your shared audience with complementary products or host a panel with service providers that consult with your audience.
Common mistakes: Whenever doing anything with partners, you open yourself up to having misaligned goals, different quality bars, etc. Make sure you are aligned on what everyone will bring to the table in advance, before, during, and after the event.
Example: Mutiny, AudiencePlus, and Clearbit hosted a 3 city “Efficient Growth Tour” a couple years ago–as 3 startups at different stages they were able to share the burden of hosting these events, work together to get quality guest speakers, and drive greater attendance then they could alone.
Section 3: Deep dive into each marketing engine
This is the promised definitive guide to each engine. In the future, when deciding if you should expand to a new channel, re-reference this section. Remember: there’s a summary chart of each engine at the top of this newsletter.
🛝 Inbound Marketing
Overview:
When to Use: Your startup has a broad audience or an audience that actively seeks out information to better themselves in their job. Inbound also works well when your prospects like to self-educate on products and when it’s easy to understand your product’s value quickly.
Note: Almost all startups should do some amount of inbound. It might not be primary, but it’s table stakes to rank for highly-relevant keywords (or use paid search to appear in results).
Execution: Focus on creating valuable content like blog posts, SEO, webinars, and lead magnets for the purpose of driving search traffic, social shares, and third parties to post links on their websites driving referral traffic.
Team requirements: You’ll need skilled content teams–especially at creating highly shareable or highly ranking search content.
Best for:
Startups with: Target audiences who seek out content, services & products on their own, typically with shorter sales cycles & lower price points
GTM motion: A primarily inbound top of funnel strategy pairs best with self-serve GTM motions and hybrid GTM motions (self-serve + sales-led). It can work for sales-led businesses as well, but often not as a primary channel.
Less effective for: Consultative sales, regulated industries, complex products, (high ACV).
Scalability & efficiency:
Intent: By nature of clicking through to your website from content, search results, another website, etc. these prospects are typically high-intent and moving them through the funnel requires fewer touchers than other channels.
Ramp time: Inbound can take longer to ramp than other channels—specific inbound channels like SEO can take months to be effective, as you need to start ranking. Success on social typically requires building up a following first. And getting referenced by other companies on their websites, typically involves partnerships (see ecosystem section for more on this) or a high-degree of awareness and credibility already.
Long-term scalability: Inbound is often more scalable in the long-term, as your efforts will start to compound.
How to test: Since organic inbound can take a while to build up, you can test viability of specific channels or tactics using paid first to know if the organic investment is worth it. I.e. test if certain keywords convert well with SEM, before doubling down on SEO efforts for that keyword.
Impact of AI & automation: AI is changing search. Anyone can now generate SEO content really fast–increasing competition. At the same time search volume is getting replaced by LLMs like chatGPT, so it may not be as scalable in the future. For social, it’s much easier to repurpose existing content into social-ready content (with tools like Riverside.fm), but it’s easier for everyone to do this so you still need clear storylines and a differentiated brand to stand out.
How to know if inbound is working: Monitor conversion throughout the funnel and CAC (customer acquisition cost) for each inbound channel (search, social, referral) and be sure to look at the channels influence on revenue, not just first and last touch attribution.
Common mistakes & pitfalls
Lack of control: You’re beholden to algorithms and waiting for contacts to find you. Since inbound takes time to yield results; many startups quit too early. Use SEM and paid social to augment during the ramp up time, but remember to scale back when organic starts working.
Leaky funnel: If your website doesn’t convert or your funnel is leaky, inbound may look ineffective at driving efficient revenue, so be sure to spend time improving conversion rates before stepping on the gas (especially with paid inbound).
Diminishing returns, especially on paid search: Inbound is less “hands-on” compared to other channels meaning you are kind of sending content into the universe and hoping for the best–and you are highly reliant on mysterious algorithms. Given this, it can slip out from under you faster than other channels. You can hit a ceiling on search volume, watch a competitor gain on you quickly with SEO, or watch a social channel go bust (looking at you Twitter/X). My advice: Have a back up plan!
Focusing on quantity over quality: It can be tempting to churn out tons and tons of content, but most of the time quality matters over quality. If you do wnat to create tons of SEO content, try implementing a programmatic SEO strategy, leveraging AI content creation + dynamic CMS capabilities (like in Webflow & Framer).
📩 Outbound Marketing
Overview
When to Use: Outbound is an obvious fit when you have a known audience, want to generate quick traction or expand within specific segments, or have a highly-priced or complex product and sales cycle that requires many touch points. It can scale quickly to any account you have contact info for, but gets spammy fast.
Execution: Proactively reach out to prospects through cold emails, calls, or LinkedIn outreach. You’re targeting a pre-defined audience, so you’ll reach prospects who might not be actively looking for your product.
Team requirements: You’ll typically hire SDRs or BDRs to run outbound and augment the team with autmoation tools to add more capacity and increase efficiency. These roles can sit on the marketing or sales team, but either way needs close collaboration with all areas of marketing to make sure outreaches include compelling content & messaging.
Best for…
Startups with: a knowable TAM. Outbound is an obvious fit when your startup has a discoverable TAM (total addressable market) and a well-defined ICP (ideal customer profile), meaning it’s possible to get to a list of target accounts and relevant contacts. This is typically the case for startups with small to medium-sized TAMs, or those targeting a specific vertical.
GTM motion: Outbound works best with sales-led GTM motions (it’s awkward to get personal outreach and sign up in a self-serve way), with longer sales cycles and high ACVs (Average Contract Value).
Less effective for: Self-serve products, products with lower price points, horizontal audiences. And startups in the EU–way more rules about email there!
Outbound scalability & efficiency
Intent: With outbound, intent is typically lower than for other channels since you are contacting people on your terms, not theirs. That said, with signal-based outbound becoming more and more popular (thanks to tools like Pocus, Clay, Unify among others), it’s easier to target outbound to people with higher intent.
Ramp time: Outbound can also be ramped up quickly assuming you have your account and contact list and the right tooling–so it’s great for testing new audiences or markets.
Long-term scalability: Highly-personalized, manual outbound is fairly resource-intensive and you typically need to add more and more SDRs and BDRs to the team when you want to increase volume. Meaning, it gets very expensive and often teams don't have the right processes in place to get true economies of scale on the SDR or BDR function like you can in growth marketing roles. However, all of this is changing due to AI and new tooling.
Impact of AI & Automation: As I mentioned, there’s an entirely new set of tools making it possible to do account research, get relevant signals to help you know when to reach out to prospects, and personalize outreach easily.
How to test: Pick a niche audience, gather the needed contact info using a tool like Clay or Apollo, and start testing outbound sequences and campaigns.
How to know if outbound is working: If you are able to reach your target, high-value accounts quickly and effectively and schedule meetings with them, it’s likely successful. With some caveats…
Attribution risk: Without clear attribution and rules of engagement, outbound efforts may appear more effective than they actually are–and it’s easy for outbound to “get credit” for leads that originate elsewhere or were nurtured through other channels.
To avoid this confusion: Map your funnel & establish rules of engagement for when and by whom contacts or accounts can be reached out to.
Common mistakes & pitfalls
Brand dilution: Outbound is—let’s be honest—annoying as a prospect, especially when excessive, across multiple touch points, and with bad “fuel”. Avoid brand dilution with relevant, high-quality content–think of it as a value-exchange and don’t just jump to asking for a meeting. And watch out for over-personalization that feels forced, poor targeting, or sending generic messages.
Infinite BDR hiring: Don’t fall into the trap of hiring BDR after BDR, scaling linearly with revenue. Layer in marketing and ops to help increase efficiency and make sure learnings are shared across reps. Create feedback loops where you are manually testing, scaling, and automating. Rinse and repeat.
🦠 Product Virality
Overview
When to Use: This growth strategy is highly dependent on your product type. If your users and customers find it easy and beneficial to bring others in, product virality can drive exponential growth.
Execution: To drive product virality, make it easy for users to share or invite users to your product, enhance onboarding, build collaboration features that encourage group use, and/or offer rewards for referrals.
Team requirements: When growth is driven primarily by product virality, marketing should pair with a product growth team that helps drive engagement and invites. Within marketing, a strong lifecycle marketing team is needed.
Best for…
Startups with: Products that are easy to sign up for and get value from quickly, with a free or low cost product offering.
GTM motion: Product virality goes hand in hand with a self-serve, PLG motion–or a hybrid motion with a sales assist.
Less effective for: Products with high price points and long sales cycles, in niche markets, with complex or high-touch products, or in high-regulated industries (e.g., healthcare or finance). These products often struggle with virality due to limited audience reach, need for a consultative sale, and compliance restrictions. Will not be a fit for startups that don’t have product-support for improved onboarding, adoption, and retention features in the product.
Scalability & efficiency
Intent: Typically high intent, as they come in recommended by other users they trust.
Ramp time: Product virality requires a user base to help you grow, so getting that initial user base through other channels first is necessary. But after that, if you put effort into onboarding, lifecycle marketing, and product growth loops, things can start to move very quickly.
Long-term scalability: If your product has strong virality, this is an extremely cost-effective and scalable channel once you have an engaged core user base.
How to test: If you think product virality is possible, begin tracking your k-factor (a metric measuring viral growth) early on. If vriality starts happening naturally, it’s likely worth investing more here.
Impact of AI & automation: It’s much easier to identify high-value users likely to refer others by tracking engagement signals and sending timely referral prompts. It’s also easier to accelerate product adoption with tools that enable app nudges, product tours, and tailored messages—leading to a faster viral loop.
How to know if virality is happening: Look for high referral rates or a high K-factor, meaning existing users are actively inviting or sharing the product with others. Also track how much revenue comes from referred or invited users, but know that this tracking will never capture all of the users driven by virality or word of mouth.
Common mistakes & pitfalls
No compelling reason to share: You might think your product should have virality b/c you added a few share or invite buttons to the onboarding flow, but you need to truly think about what value it brings to both the user inviting others and to the invited user to make product virality a viable growth engine.
Product virality only driving free users–who don’t convert to paid: Monetizing free users that come from viral growth can be challenge…if the free experience doesn’t naturally lead to upsell opportunities, you might attract users who don’t convert.
Forgetting about retention: The product must continually deliver value so that referred users stick around and become advocates themselves.
📅 Events
For more on sponsoring tradeshows, I recently wrote this Linkedin thread after attening Hubspot inbound on how to make a booth that isn’t a total waste of money.
Overview
When to Use: Whether hosting webinars or attending trade shows, events give your startup an opportunity to show off your brand, product, and team. Event goals include: building community and relationships, generating reusable content, and nurturing prospects (and customers).
Execution: Build relationships and drive engagement through in-person or virtual events, hosted by your company or others.
Hosted events: Virtual or in person events, requiring you to drive attendance through other owned growth channels (like outbound, inbound, etc)
Third-party hosted events: Virtual or in person events hosted by another company who drives attendance and registration for you.
Team requirements: Events are logistics heavy, so if this is your primary growth engine, an events coordinator is hugely beneficial.
Hosted events: Requires both great content and a clear strategy for driving event registration.
Third-party hosted events: Requires budget to sponsor, and team members to be at the event–this could mean a whole team of people if you sponsored a booth for multiple days.
Best for…
Startups with: Longer sales cycles, high-touch sales models, or consultative sales, especially in industries where relationships and community are highly valued or where signicant education on a new or emerging category is needed.
GTM motion: Typically pairs best with sales-led GTM motions–event registration offers a lower commitment, more top of funnel CTA compared to scheduling a demo. But events can also be useful for engaging existing customers and turning them into advocates (especially when you also have a product virality growth engine).
Less effective for: Short self-serve sales cycles, products with low ACVs without the budget to produce or sponsor events, startups without a clear story or differentiated brand.
Scalability & efficiency
Virtual events can be started quickly and scaled faster, but in-person events can get really expensive really fast! In either case, sales typically don’t happen during the event and follow-up through other channels before, during or after the event is essential.
Intent: For product-related and hosted events, intent is typically high. When sponsoring events with a broad audience or brand-focused events, intent is lower.
Ramp time: The decision to throw lots of money at an event sponsorship or even to host a webinar can be made quickly. Making the event a success takes a while. Interacting with the right people, using the right content, and following up effectively–that’s what requires ramp time and multiple attempts at getting it right.
Long-term scalability: Events are resource-intensive due to venue, travel, or hosting costs, making it most effective for high-ACV models. Scalable with virtual events, but less so in-person. But events drive a different level of engagement than any other channel, so they can actually help make every other channel more scalable.
How to test:
Hosted events: Start with a simple webinar before moving to a webinar series, in person event–and long, long before you host your own conference.
Third-party hosted events: Attend the event before sponsoring the massive tradeshow, unless you’ve been to many similar tradeshows as an attendee or sponsor and know the audience and content align. And before you sponsor you can also consider hosting a “side event”, i.e. a happy at a venue near the conference.
Impact of AI & automation: Follow up is much easier now as many event and marketing automation tools send customized invites, reminders, and follow-ups, improving engagement before, during, and after the event. It’s also much easier to repurpose event content into social content or long-form content with tools like Riverside.fm and Goldcast.
How to know if events are working: Since other channels are necessary to drive attendance and follow-up, events are not typically the original source or last source before an opportunity. So make sure you are tracking the revenue “influence” from events–set up campaigns in your marketing automation tool for each event to do this.
Common mistakes:
Poor event follow up: Content repurposing & follow-up are needed to make events worth it.
Choosing 3rd party events at random: It’s hard to know which tradeshows are most effective, so I recommend attending and scheduling meetings while there (or even hosting a side event) your first year to see if its worthwhile in the future.
Thinking events are just “engines”: Events, unlike the other “engines” listed here, can also be classified as “fuel” because they help you generate content. Think of events as both fuel and engine and you’ll get more out of them!
🪸 Ecosystem Marketing
I’ll be writing a newsletter dedicated to ecosystem marketing before the end of the year, subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Overview
What is it: I define ecosystem marketing as using “partners” to drive growth. Partners can be integration partners, service providers, influencers, or your own users via community.
When to Use: If there are potential partners who have credibility with and more easily able to reach your target audience(s) and these partners will find benefit in partnering with you themselves, ecosystem is a viable path for growth.
Execution: Identify strategic partners with complementary products, services, or audiences. Collaborate through co-marketing initiatives, joint events, product integrations, or revenue-sharing programs, such as affiliate, referral, or channel sales partnerships.
Team Requirements: Partnerships lead or ecosystem manager with a strong network and experience in co-marketing. And, in some cases product and eng support are needed to build or improve integrations.
Best for…
Startups who: Have products that integrate with many other products, audiences who rely on service partners to do their job, or audiences who put lots of trust in influencers or community members in their industries.
GTM Motion: Ecosystem partnerships are so varied, that this engine is not reliant or dependent on one GTM motion. That said, ecosystem marketing can be a “GTM motion” itself, e.g. Channel partnerships are a way of selling.
Less effective for: Some industries just don’t have as many complementary companies (whether products or services) in them, and there isn’t an obvious path to make this a viable growth engine.
Scalability & efficiency
Intent: Prospects referred by partners are typically very high intent, either because they trust the partner recommending you or they already use a product that integrates directly with yours.
Ramp Time: It takes a bit of time to figure out the best structure and arrangement for different partner types, but once you have found a type of partner that works you can often grow these programs quickly.
Long-term Scalability: If your ecosystem is also growing (or you are helping to grow it!), scalability is very high, especially with a self-serve or frictionless sign up process. That said, startups sometimes end up “replacing” the very partners that helped them grow–especially when partners are service providers like consultants, agencies, lawyers, accountants, etc.
How to Test: Start with one or two partners that have significant audience overlap or complementary products.
How AI and automation are impacting Ecosystem Marketing: It’s easier to identify potential partners using the same tools you’d use to do contact research for outbound (like Clay) and it’s possible to dynamically create custom landing pages for each partner with tools like Framer & Webflow.
How to know if Ecosystem Marketing is working: The best way to measure ecosystem marketing success is through direct referrals from partners–or at the very least through referral traffic. If you do co-marketing or joint campaigns, make sure you track the campaigns “influence” on revenue.
Caveat: Referral traffic may be classified as inbound, so its helpful to create a grouping for official partner sites so you can separate this from inbound and bucket as ecosystem for attributions purposes.
Example: I recently spoke to a fintech company and I thought financial advisors and wealth managers would be a great channel partnership opportunity for them to drive SMB growth. While this could work, I found out only 10% of the startup’s prospects have financial advisors or wealth managers. So it’s not as viable a channel as I originally guessed when I though there was likely 90% coverage.
Common Mistakes
Prioritizing quantity over quality in partnerships: As with most things in marketing, less is often more. A few strong partnerships generally outperform many weak ones.
Neglecting the partner relationship once launched: Partnerships require ongoing engagement and value alignment to stay productive.
Limiting your thinking on what “Ecosystem” means: Don't’ forget about those service providers and complementary products that you don’t integrate but serve the same audiences.
🏀 Takeaways
I wish developing your “engine” strategy was as easy as picking one channel that seems like the mostly likely fit for you startup, mixing in the exact right “fuel” with value-add content, and bam you can grow to $100M+.
But it’s not that simple. The basketball team MVP can’t do it alone, and neither can one growth engine. Test channels one by one, layer in complementary channels, and never rest on your laurels. Growth marketing is an ever evolving sport, stay on your toes.
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📚 Additional reading & listening:
My 3 part growth strategy series from last year gets more specific on channels and provides even more detail how to evaluate which are the best fit for your audience, market, GTM motion, and marketing advantages and how to think about testing and scaling channels.
Hubspot featured me in their Masters in Marketing series, where I discuss a bit about how I create these newsletters.
I also did a podcast with RevenueHero on forecasting—so if you are forecasting for 2025, check it out.
Bonus section: What engines are most recommended in [x] scenario?
For paid subscribers
If you are still struggling to know which engine to start with, what engine to layer in, or maybe most importantly what engine to skip, these next few scenarios should help.
Assuming you have the right GTM motion for your startup (more in this newsletter)...
It’s typically best for startups that sell lower priced products, with shorter sales cycles, and self-serve motions to start with inbound, and hopefully find a way to get product virality. Ecosystem and events can be successful, if you can find high-volume partners and host virtual events.
Outbound is often where I start for sales-led businesses, given they typcially have higher priced products, longer sales cycles, and a clearly defined TAM. Layering in ecosystem and events can help provide enoguh touchpoints and relationship building to drive the sale.
3 more scenarios and explanations available just for paid subscribers below.