In the earliest growth phase, cold emailing individual prospects was Ankur's entire acquisition motion.

“If we wanted to grow 10% monthly two years ago, I could single handedly do that by cold emailing a few potential customers”

As volume needs grew, he replaced 1:1 selling with a recurring weekly webinar to about 100 people, converting roughly a quarter of attendees.

“we could host a weekly webinar to a hundred people and get 25 to buy Teachable every week”

By the $500K MRR stage, an ongoing content program was one of several channels needed simultaneously to keep hitting 10% monthly growth.

“our content program to bring in more leads than before”

Affiliates were named as one of the channels driving meaningful traffic at the $500K MRR stage, alongside paid acquisition and content.

“affiliates to drive meaningful traffic”

Paid acquisition was folded into the growth playbook by 2017 as one channel among several needed to keep hitting monthly growth targets.

“paid acquisition to deliver results”

About a year later, Ankur admitted paid acquisition specifically was underperforming and the company was not effective at deploying capital to buy growth, unlike the other channels.

“Our paid acquisition campaigns and programs thus far haven't shown a ton of promise”