You Can’t Cut Your Way to Growth

Some of the best brands that we see have really come to understand that they understand they need to fuel that top of funnel. They understand that it's not about maximizing the incrementality of every individual channel, and saying like, this is crushing it on contribution margin. And if it's not, I'm just going to start yanking everything out. They're growing by addition, not by subtraction. You can't cut your way to growth really. We saw this quick story. We saw this in one of our acquisitions, Drew, a number of years ago. They were losing money, but they actually were getting a fairly healthy ROAS or on a contribution margin basis in search. And we were like, okay, let's step on the gas there. And we pushed more money into search. But what we didn't anticipate to the extent that we saw was how much it ended up juicing the other channels performance.

We ended up tripling that business inside of 90 days, which was insane because this was already almost a $40 million business at the time. And it was a result of sort of the opposite of what we're talking about. It was starting to push more money into channels that ended up spilling over and driving greater efficiency across our entire mix. And we wouldn't have seen that if we were only really optimizing for that one specific channel.

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