You don’t need a multichannel strategy
You can easily get to £3-5m ARR just on your primary channel
“Most companies get zero channels to work.” — Peter Thiel
Growth strategies and marketing strategies are almost always plans, not strategies.
They are staggered timelines of when to introduce campaigns and channels. Maybe they feature some goal setting.
But they’re not strategies.
A good growth strategy includes two core elements:
Analysis of where the current bottlenecks are
A set of guiding principles to tackle those bottlenecks
The goals should be set at a company-level (“We want to hit £10m by the end of the year” or “we need to hit break-even by October” or “We’re fundraising in Feb and so need to hit £1m ARR by November”).
The tactics or actions, at least in the way we operate, all come through the growth experimentation process.
I want us all to have this in mind today as I walk us through one of the biggest flags I see in teams of all sizes.
The myth of the multi-channel strategy
A brand came to me recently with a shopping list:
Meta, Google, SEO, email, CRO, organic.
They were doing about £1 million in revenue.
Their request? Help us do all of it.
My answer? No. Just focus on Meta.
We’ve been sold this idea that every growth plan needs to be multichannel.
That you need a presence everywhere: Instagram, TikTok, search, influencers, newsletters, affiliates, the lot.
Sometimes this comes from investors who don’t understand how marketing.
Sometimes it comes from the fact that their current channel seems to have hit diminishing returns.
Both of those come with good intentions, but ultimately it is a myth.
The one reason why this is so important to get right
Let’s take a step back and remind ourselves that the vast majority if businesses fail.
The VC failure rate is baked into the model. Venture capital is in the business of outsized returns. The people who invest into venture capital funds have lots of options with their wealth, and venture capital exists as a way to offer higher risk, but higher reward.
The old mantra was that for a startup to become a unicorn you had to hit £100m in annual revenue. New era that figure will likely go higher.
And so the very nature of what VC invests in is the tiny, tiny, tiny group of businesses that could grow to that level.
In the US, 5.2m businesses were created in 2024
But there are just 2,800 public companies doing over $100m/year.
Venture capital is focused on those businesses. If 75% of VC businesses fail, 24% might make a little bit of money that no-one cares for, and 1% make the serious big money.
All this to say, if you’re in a VC-backed business, then what you’re trying to achieve is really hard. The entire business model is stacked against you to perform fast and big. Failure to do so will mean no more funding and you die.
If you’re not venture-backed. Then your bigger concern is profitability. Not gross margin profitability but company-wide.
For you, your challenge is getting overall gross profit in the business up to a significant enough level to break-even.
Maybe slower growth is fine, but only as long as your burn rate allows.
Whichever business model you’re in, the biggest problem is always the same.
As Peter Thiel says, “poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.”
It’s almost impossible to get a channel working
I’ve had a lot of exposure to pre-product-market-fit (PMF) and pre-product-channel-fit (PCF) businesses. PCF is vital for PMF. If you don’t have marketing working, you’ve not proven your market.
I had a startup failure due to no product market fit.
I’ve coached on a startup accelerator for a year or so.
I’ve spoken to over 300+ early-stage founders who are struggling with PMF. Most of those businesses have now died.
I’ve consulted on a dozen or so businesses at this stage.
And at Ballpoint, we’ve worked with ~12 who on reflection didn’t have PMF or PCF.
Of those 12, we’ve helped five find it, and the other seven we didn’t. I.e. our success rate is 41% – quite a big higher than the overall failure rate, so I’ll take that.
Getting growth right is hard. Getting any channel work is basically impossible.
Paid social requires months and months and months of relentless learning, optimisation, and experimentation. Other channels require huge upfront costs. Others rely on blackboxes we can’t predict. Not getting a channel working is the number one cause of business death.
When this works: stripping all marketing back to just Meta at Ferly
After my failed startup, I spent time consulting.
One of those gigs was the fractional growth lead at a female sexual wellness app called Ferly. When I started there, the founder Billie and I were talking about me doing one day a week and she said the role needed two or three.
We went through all of the stuff that they were doing. All the different channels, and the different experiments.
I said “we’re going to drop all of that and just focus on Meta.”
In hindsight, she took a massive leap of faith in that.
But over the course of the next year, that started to pay off. We went from four figures of monthly recurring revenue up to the elusive £1m annual recurring revenue level in under a year. We found product-channel fit, and with it validated the PMF.
Failed companies where the focus was forced to be spread
Last year we worked with a business where the initial request was one of a complete menu of support. Digital PR and SEO, affiliates, paid search, influencer, paid social, and CRO.
“We need to focus” I said, and in spirit the founder agreed.
But in practice, the workload kept coming around to ‘let’s just do this channel as its light touch.’
“How long will that take you to do really?” they asked.
The actual time it is true, was not very long. But context switching is a huge mental cost. Every hour spent on one activity, is more than an hour not spent on another.
There’s a reason a small teams have higher productivity. Focus is the most important thing.
Getting one channel singing is an existential threat: and multiple channels gives fake psychological comfort
This is a big one.
One thing I’ve noticed is that brands who are retail-first, often struggle to crack into DTC.
The hypothesis I have is that when DTC isn’t working – as it won’t do for months and months – they fall back on their thriving retail business. That’s logical.
The same thing happens when you don’t have PMF and are trying to get something working.
Meta not working? OK but at least affiliates is showing some promise. I don’t need to worry.
It’s false reassurance, and it ends up killing businesses.
Meta can get you to £5m ARR by itself. If you’re really struggling to get past £1m, the problem is probably the product
This is the big one and the one that people don’t want to admit.
Meta is probably the best channel after TV for reaching the biggest possible audience of people. But unlike TV, its cost is snackable.
But the truth is that you can scale a UK brand to £5m a year on Meta alone.
If you’re in the US, it’s likely more like $50-100m/year just on Meta.
If you are struggling, and I mean really struggling to get past early milestones: £500k, £1m, £2m, then you’ve got a bigger problem that marketing can’t fix. Sure you need to really give it a good go. And the cruelest trick in the book is that there’s no good answer for ‘how long it takes to get it working'.
We used to say 3 months to give it a chance, now we say 6.
And so if you are confident that you :
really know your shit about your customers and
the problems they have
are treating the channel in the way it should be treated (give it as much data as possible and be hands-off)
are creating content rapidly that is social-first
making content that people actually care about (almost all content sucks)
Then the problem may well be with your product, rather than the marketing. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow because as founder, it’s your baby. Product-market fit sucks. I’ve been there.
“If you can’t get Meta working, you don’t have product market fit”
Charles Instone, founder of Wild Dose
One day you will hit diminishing returns
If this is in those early stages of revenue or spend, then focus whatever you can on pivoting your product. Take half of your marketing budget and put it into new product development or iterating on current design. If you don’t, you’ll probably end up joining the 60%/75% club.
But say you do get past these and you’re into the tens of millions, you’ll still hit diminishing returns on your core channel. And then you’ll need to diversify.
At this stage, I imagine you’ll be wishing for the scale or CPAs you can get from your primary channel. Your measurement will get more complex. You’ll have more moving levers. And you’ll have a more complex system where experimentation becomes longer form.
Get your basics in order
While focus is important you should get your basics right.
Email: a basic setup is enough to mop up conversions.
CRO: Shopify templates are fine—your problem isn’t your add-to-cart button.
Paid search: unless you’re a marketplace or high intent biz, it’s not a growth lever.
SEO: slow, expensive, and increasingly commoditised by AI.
Organic social: find a way, probably with AI to automate some feed content, and re-Story everything you get mentioned in.
Invest predominantly in your core channel
It may feel repetitive and even a bit boring, but become laser focused on nailing your core channel. For most consumer businesses it’s probably Meta. It still works today. For our biggest clients, they are consistently growing, consistently having better months than the ones before. It works.
Don’t get distracted. Don’t follow the shiny object. Just go all in on the core channel that suits your business.
The bottleneck is almost always ‘we can’t get our core channel working enough’ and from there you can form the strategy around that.
Out with multi-channel, in with pure unrelenting focus.
https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/research-commentary/2025/pwc-analysis-finds-failure-rates-amongst-startups-at-lowest-leve.html
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/09/29/startup-failure/