// Morning!
… And for any new readers, welcome to Signal // Noise — the newsletter read by CEOs, founders, & scrappy builders every Thursday. Each week, what I’m listening to, one deep dive, notes from the field, three links worth your time. No buzz, no bullshit.
While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:
Everything I play gone be funky…
Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (From Now On)
Lou Donaldson · Everything I Play Is Funky · Song · 1995
🎧 Want the whole vibe? Find & bookmark the running playlist right here.
From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…
The Signal
One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.
When Your First Channel Runs Out of Steam
Last week we talked about buyer misalignment, how growth actually slows not because demand evaporates but because you’re selling to yesterday’s audience.
This week is a different part of the problem: channel exhaustion.
It’s one of those traps we all fall into without realizing it: the tactics and channels that worked beautifully early on just stop working. And instead of diagnosing the issue, we throw more budget, more content, more spaghetti at the wall, and then wonder why nothing sticks.
Why Growth Begins to Pause
When you push toward $3M–$10M ARR, it’s completely normal to hit a wall. The channels that pulled early demand, things like paid social, a niche community audience, SEO keywords you owned, begin to yield less and less. CAC slowly creeps up, conversion rates flatten or decrease, and doubling down doesn’t move the needle.
This patterns out in the wild.
Henry Kraus observes that most SaaS playbooks from early stages “officially expire” somewhere around ~$3M ARR — the GTM motion loses steam, paid channels stall, and what once felt like celebration now feels like confusion.
Casey Winters says most startups grow initially through a single acquisition loop (e.g., SEO, ads, sales), but that loop eventually asymptotes. His point is that layering on new channels only makes sense once your unit economics, scale, or product breadth have created room for them — otherwise you’re not really adding fuel to an existing fire.
Lastly, Andrew Chen points out there are only so many acquisition channels and they only scale so far; even viral loops or compounding product growth eventually saturate, while churn and customer fatigue continue on their linear march.
In plain English: the mountain you climbed to get to your first few million is going to become a cliff. Hard stop.
Been There: Two Times We Ran Out of Room
When I became CEO of The Hustle, growth was already plateauing. Four years of cheap Facebook ads had built a nice engine — easy to scale, predictable — until it wasn’t. CAC was rising, returns tapered, and it was obvious that growth was radically slowing.
We never really had to figure it out on our own because of the HubSpot acquisition; suddenly, we had SEO teams, new distribution channels, newsletter swaps, and an entire creator ecosystem to build around us. Growth picked back up, by nature of an acquisition.
At Hampton, it played out similarly but a bit earlier. Our first ~18 months were heavily weighted toward Sam Parr’s hit podcast, the My First Million audience. That channel fit us incredibly well; high intent, high trust, tight matching ICP. But by mid-cycle, the numbers were slowing. The same posts and mentions didn’t move the needle like before.
In that case, we said, okay, where does our ICP already live, are there ways of finding them there, and is anyone else already doing this well in a way we can learn from?
That led to:
Outbound experiments (a new, untested route, but we knew competitors were having success),
A more focused effort on paid (it was already steady, but not a true growth driver),
And launching a new podcast (Moneywise) that met people where they already were — not because we liked podcasts, but because our members listened to podcasts. Survey data, referral patterns, and actual acquisition paths all screamed it. So we followed that signal instead of inventing one.
Discovery Before Execution
Now, here’s the thing that I think sometimes people skip over in the madness to find more growth.
I’ve literally had a CEO ask me: “Should we do organic Facebook or Instagram?” (This was a court reporting transcripts company.)
My next question: “Who is the decision-maker, and are they typically on Facebook or Insta?”
Their answer: “Hmmmm. I’m not sure. But I don’t think so.”
That’s the lesson: if you don’t know where your buyer actually spends their time, giving their attention, you aren’t ready to pick channels, you’re ready to do more discovery.
Trust me, before you throw more ad dollars on-platform, focus on discovery more than execution.
And by that I mean:
Talk to your customers: where do they hang out, what do they read, who do they follow. Ask them if they weren’t using your product, how would they find a substitute? Where would they go?
Look at the data you already have: acquisition touch points, referral sources, survey feedback.
Spend time just observing behavior: not planning content, just watching.
Only then do you decide where to focus.
Tools That Help You See Where They Are
Once you have hypotheses about where attention is actually happening, you can validate and explore:
SimilarWeb: figure out where traffic clusters for competitor or adjacent audiences.
Ahrefs: discover which keywords actually have search demand and who ranks for them.
Reddit/Industry Communities: peek into authentic, unfiltered conversations.
Surveys & 1:1 discovery calls: ask customers where they spend attention before they knew you existed.
These aren’t growth hacks, they’re just signal tools. They tell you where the audience already lives, so you don’t go chasing waterfalls (boom, TLC reference).
Here’s a Simple Tactical Playbook
Here’s the practical, tactical sequence:
1) Audit your channels for exhaustion
CAC trends up?
Win rates slip?
Same content/same offer yielding less?
Usually this isn’t incompetence — it’s saturation.
2) Do more discovery before new tactics
Stop guessing. Ask, watch, analyze.
3) Add one new channel at a time
Don’t shotgun everything like some sort of growth cowboy.
Pick the next channel only after you have evidence it’s where your people actually are. Then treat it like an experiment, not a bet.
4) Systemize what works
If you’re the only one who can close, convert, negotiate, onboard, or evangelize, you haven’t scaled yet, you’ve just built the classic Founder’s Bottleneck. Which is fine, but then the next step needs to be to systematize.
Just remember, if you’re somewhere in the $3M-$10M ARR range, running out of steam on your first big growth channel is inevitable. You ran out of undiscovered audience in that one place.
That’s fine. But now it’s time to figure out what’s next!
Field Notes
Dispatches from the field - lessons, stories, interviews, experiments.
I jumped on the Marketing Misfits podcast recently, and these two dudes were a lot of fun. We talked about why attention without trust is useless, the real difference between an audience and a community, how The Hustle turned content into leverage, and why most paid communities quietly fall apart after launch. (also that thumbnail looks like i’m about to do go on some insane political rant or sell you on why tumeric pills are cancer causing, wtf).
Watch below or 🎧 Listen here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-most-paid-communities-suck-jordan-dipietro/id1743439163?i=1000745943113
A few Jawns to Check Out
Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.
I linked to this one above, too, but I really like it. Casey Winters, ex-GrubHub and ex-Pinterest, now writer/advisor, breaks down why startups often first find traction through a single acquisition loop (ads, SEO, virality, sales) and then hit an invisible ceiling. The key insight is to ask whether your economics, product depth, or engagement fundamentals have shifted enough to support a new channel. I dig it. Check it out here.
A really great take on the difference between viral effects (getting users to bring you more users) and network effects (your product getting more valuable as more people use it); and why confusing the two can mess up your growth strategy. Viral effects can be great for rapid user growth, but network effects are what build real defensibility and long-term value. Understanding the distinction helps you pick the right priorities for scaling. Check it out here.
You know how much I love a strong reading list, and Ryan’s January Reading List has me particularly excited to get to this one: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr. It reframes American history by showing how the U.S. isn’t just the fifty states on a map but a Greater United States shaped by territories, overseas outposts, and global influence most of us never learned in school. Feels like a good time to better understand our own history. Check it out here.
Thanks for sticking with Part 2, digging into why your early growth channels eventually run out of gas and what to do about it.
Next week: we flip the whole script and talk about the leaky bucket — AKA retention and churn — the hidden growth killer that quietly drains more revenue than any acquisition problem ever does.
And until next time, thanks for reading.
Jordan
P.S. Wanna work on something? Got a pod or content idea? → Email me | Need 30–60 min of advice? → Book here | Want a coach in your corner? → More info
