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Y Combinator
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  • Founders should generally avoid spending money to acquire users for free consumer apps, as paid acquisition typically results in temporary metric spikes followed by a return to baseline performance.
  • Significant growth in free consumer apps is attributed to founders discovering non-obvious methods for cheaply distributing their products to large audiences rather than paid marketing.
  • Paid user acquisition for free apps functions as a delaying tactic that merely pushes inevitable decline rather than solving fundamental growth issues.
  • The only exception to this rule involves structured experiments where the explicit goal is learning rather than user acquisition.
    • Budgets for such experiments must be strictly limited.
    • Success criteria and learning objectives must be defined explicitly before spending begins.