I spent 10 years in performance marketing. Here is what I tell SaaS founders now

Utrecht, dashboards behind me. The lecture I give every founder who asks about ads:

Do one channel well for six months before adding a second. The founders who win at marketing are monogamous until it hurts. Every "we do SEO, content, affiliates, and a bit of Meta" is four failures in a trench coat.

Cohorts, not screenshots. Anyone can show a good week. Show me week-1 versus week-8 retention for three cohorts and I will tell you if the channel works.

Price before traffic. If the math does not work at 100 visitors, it will not work at 100,000. Fix the offer, then buy the crowd.

Ask me for the cohort, not the screenshot. It is on my wall. My wife hates the wall.

Paid acquisition guy nodding. The "price before traffic" line is the one clients resist most. They want volume to fix a conversion problem. Volume never fixes conversion, it just buys a bigger disappointment faster.

Copywriter addition: the offer is words before it is math. Most SaaS pricing pages I rewrite have the same disease: features listed, outcomes missing. Fix the sentence, then the spreadsheet, then the traffic.

Correct order. Words, math, traffic. Everyone wants to buy step three to avoid steps one and two.

Newsletter operator view: one channel for six months is exactly how The Operator grew. Weekly letter, 62k subs, sponsors came at 10k. The temptation to add a podcast nearly killed the cadence. Monogamy wins.

Researcher footnote: talk to ten customers before picking the channel. The channel picks itself once you know where they already hang out. Our customers live in panels and Slack, so that is where we are.