I’m betting my entire career on this:

Every marketing channel sucks

– Andrew Chen (Head of Growth at Uber and legendary VC) last week.

I disagree. In fact, I’m betting my entire career on the opposite statement:

“There’s never been a better time to market.”

It’s never been easier to turn yourself into a megaphone.

And that’s thanks to content marketing. 

Not the Hubspot-style content marketing from the 2010s. No, I’m talking about algorithmic content marketing.

It’s one of the only marketing channel that yields both short-term results and long-term distribution moat.

So why did Andrew Chen recently say that every marketing channel sucks?

Maybe he meant that every marketing channel is saturated.

That’s true. Look at your LinkedIn DMs… compared to 5-8 years ago. I remember doing auto DMs when very few people were.

Or paid ads… Or cold emails… Or affiliates. Saturated. Hard to scale.

He meant that those channels became “expert” channels. The law of shitty click-through rates (that he, himself coined) applies, surely.

Novelty wears off, competition adds up, consumer becomes numb.

They don’t “suck”, they’re simply old channels. And like old money, they become shielded by incumbents and need to be disrupted.

What we’re witnessing is a radical shift in marketing towards creators, towards individuals. 

Didn’t you realize that every company page sucks?

Your media velocity might matter more than your product velocity.

The shift from content-to-commerce happened.

In the past 36 months, I completely switched my marketing brain and became obsessed with MrBeast, Colin & Samir, MFM, podcasts, and newsletters—towards Twitter, TikTok, and IG creators, those ones building incredible businesses from their content-built audiences.

And I wondered, how can the same content machine be applied to startups in the opposite way?

How can we get views, eyeballs, on our products? How can we crack consumer and B2B distribution through pure content? How can we, Davids, win against the big-ad-dollar Goliaths?

The answer came to me: the future of startup and app marketing is individual accounts and content building.

And therefore, when the cost of software hits zero, product and content will become one.

I’m betting my entire career on this.

– Guillaume

It’s in the comments section

Your video’s comment section is incredibly undervalued. You might find the next powerful value proposition or hook there.

Currently, I extract and compile all comments weekly. As I review them, I’m looking for several insights:

Firstly, identify what specifically triggers reactions in your hooks or videos. Understanding these triggers helps me identify patterns to create even more engaging content.

For example, one generative AI app we’re working with recently had a video reach 1M views. 

In the comments, developers clearly expressed their reactions to the AI, providing us with insights into their frustrations and/or interests.

We then created follow-up videos addressing those specific comments. By speaking more provocatively about issues those developers care about.

It’s triggering even more engagement.

For another AI app we worked with, we made videos with 11M and 6M views:

In these comments, people explicitly suggest future content ideas and provide valuable feedback like, “Post this on Facebook Reels.” Interestingly, many viewers even mentioned the content was particularly suited for Facebook.

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After a few viral videos, your next big content idea often emerges directly from the comments section. Make sure to leverage those insights.

New App Conversion

We built a new in-house consumer app over a weekend and launched it 5 weeks ago. It took us 1 to 2 weeks to gear up distribution.

We’ve generated 4.2M views, 25K shares, and 60K bookmarks. We’ve iterated our pricing strategy 3 times, mostly increasing it until we found our sweet spot.

A single video with 2.6M views brought us over $1.8K MRR.

Initially, we discovered one hook consistently outperformed others. We repeated this successful hook 27 times, and it paid off significantly.

Here are our top-performing videos so far:

The videos repeatedly achieving over 100K views have delivered the most consistent growth.

We launched with a mix of U.S. and Spanish creators. Interestingly, Spanish-language content has performed exceptionally well, converting strongly.

Next, we’re planning to launch several faceless accounts, each focused on our best-performing hooks, and will continue iterating on our creator strategy.

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That’s a wrap.

Until next time,

The Social Growth Engineers Team.