The types of acquisition motions

In this chapter, we’ll help you architect the acquisition side of your growth engine. You’ll learn:

• The four acquisition motion types (Paid, Content, Virality, Sales), what each demands, and when they fit
• How your Foundational Five informs and constrains which motions are viable
• How different types of channels power your motion, and why some can scale as flywheels while others act as linear feeders, boosters, or kickstarters.

By the end of this deep dive, you’ll define your best-fit acquisition motions which will set the structure for you to develop you acquisition strategy and channel mix in Part 5 of the program.

The Four Acquisition Motions

While there are many different marketing channels, there are only a few motions through which companies acquire customers. Think of motions as broad, system-level categories that channels fall into.

After working with thousands of startups, we’ve found that there are four primary acquisition motions that can reliably scale growth:

• Paid Acquisition
• Content Acquisition
• Viral Acquisition
• Sales Acquisition

Each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and fit depending on your Foundational Five. In this lesson, we’ll introduce each motion so you can begin seeing which are viable for your business.

Paid-led acquisition motion

Paid acquisition refers to any channel, tactic, or marketing activity in which you're paying for new customers, traffic, or exposure. Online advertising channels are the most popular form of paid acquisition, especially for startups. Affiliates and most influencer campaigns also fall under paid.

Note that we mostly cover digital paid acquisition channels. However, traditional forms of paid acquisition, like billboards and TV ads, are also options.

When it works, paid is one of the most scalable acquisition motions. You can increase spend almost instantly. In theory 10x’ing, even 100x’ing your growth with a few clicks. Virality is another very scalable motion, but it is much harder to control. And it can take a long time to come to fruition as the fuel it runs on is users themselves. Whereas paid runs on capital which can be deployed quickly, we have to first build the user base to power a virality-led motion.

Let’s look at a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of the paid motion, as well as examine the types of companies (using the Foundation Five framework) that are best/worst positioned for paid.

Advantages

• Highly scalable. When the economics work, you can push spend and reach massive audiences quickly.
• Strong control. You decide who sees your ads, how much you spend, and when.
• Fast feedback loops. You can learn in days, not months, whether people respond to your offer.
• Low barrier to start. Even small budgets can generate useful early signals.

Disadvantages

• Intense competition. Paid is crowded. Breaking through takes sophistication in creative, targeting, and funnel design.
• Reverse economies of scale. As you spend more, you exhaust the “low-hanging fruit” (your most intent-rich audience). To keep scaling, you must target broader, lower-intent segments. CAC usually rises as a result.
• Constant upkeep. Ads fatigue. Algorithms shift. To maintain performance, you need ongoing creative testing, campaign refreshes, and analytical rigor.
• Technically scalable ≠ easily scalable. Paid’s scalability is real, but it gets more complicated (and expensive) to sustain results at scale.

Best Fits (via the Foundational Five)

Market

• Large TAM (think millions, not thousands, of potential customers)
• Audience spends time on major ad platforms

Product

• Simple, visual, or easy to explain quickly
• Short learning curve so a cold ad viewer can “get it” fast
• Broad, mass market appeal

Model

• Moderate ARPU
  • As a general rule, an ARPU between $100-$400 is ideal for paid (high enough to support CAC, but low enough for a purchase decision to be made quickly). Though this range is dependent on your market. If your market does make snap purchases for products over $400, then that of course needs to be considered. Which is also exactly why we have to test and validate our motions and the channels within them.
• Fast payback cycle (less than 6 months; the faster you return cash, the faster it can be reinvested)
• Free component to pricing strategy (free trial, freemium, etc.)

Brand

• Strong, clear story that breaks through a crowded feed
• Messaging connects emotionally (not just rationally)
• Consistent creative production capability (images, videos, copy refreshes)

Weak fits

Market

• Audience not present on major ad platforms
• Hard-to-reach segments (C-level execs, engineers, “ad-skeptical” groups)
• Markets with strong regulatory restrictions (crypto, cannabis, alcohol, health/finance niches)

Product

• Products with high implementation/onboarding friction
• Complex, multi-stakeholder products that require long education cycles

Model

• Very low ARPU (< $30) → not enough margin to sustain CAC
• High ARPU (> $2,000) paired with high product friction → unlikely to convert directly from ads
• Models that rely on long consultative sales cycles (paid can generate first actions like sign ups and newsletter subscribers, but should not be relied on for direct purchases)

Brand

• Generic or commodity positioning; if your brand is interchangeable with competitors, you’ll struggle to break out through the noise (and be penalized for it with higher ad costs)

Content-led acquisition motion

Content is one of the most talked-about ways to grow. It is also one of the most misunderstood. “Content” spans blogs, newsletters, YouTube, short-form, podcasts, communities, UGC, creator collabs, and more. That breadth makes it hard to decide where to start and what “good” looks like.

To simplify the landscape, we use a simple framework:

1. Who creates the content? Company or users
2. Who distributes the content? Company or users

This creates four practical patterns. Before we explore them, flag one idea that most teams miss:

Distribution is half the game. And probably more than half if we’re being honest.

New content dies without a distribution plan. Teams pour all of their effort into making content and almost none into getting it seen. Your strategy must specify both creation and distribution, or it is not a strategy. But we’ll get to that in Part 6.

Below, we walk through the four macro content motions.

1) Company creates → Company distributes

What it is

Your team produces the content and you push it through channels you control.

Common examples

Traditional SEO is the most well-known example. A company creates content and then distributes it via search engines. Demand Curve’s newsletter is another example. We create content and distribute it via an owned channel (email).

Advantages

• Compounds over time (especially with SEO)
• High control over quality, cadence, and positioning

Disadvantages

• Slow start without domain authority (SEO) and/or an owned audience
• High effort
• High cost

Best fits (Foundational Five lens)

• Market: actively seeking education and solutions, competitive market with high level of research going into the buying decision
• Product: known product categories with existing search volume
• Model: can tolerate longer payback cycles, moderate to high ARPU (company generated content isn’t cheap, especially at scale)
• Brand: credible and authoritative brand personality

Worst fits

• Small TAM with little search or browsing behavior
• Highly impulse-driven buying where education does not matter
• Brand and Product are undifferentiated
• Low ARPU products (with exceptions)

2) Company creates → Users distribute

What it is

You make the content. Users spread it because it is useful, fun, status-giving, or conversation-worthy.

Common examples

Spotify Wrapped style recaps, BuzzFeed viral content, Duolingo’s social media.

Advantages

• Fast reach via shares and reposts
• Low media cost per impression
• Great for top-of-funnel awareness and capture into owned lists

Disadvantages

• Spiky traffic without durable capture
• Creative fatigue if every piece tries to “go viral”
• Inconsistent results week to week

Best fits

• Market lives in feeds and forwards things to peers
• Product has clear hooks that land in 2 to 3 seconds
• Model benefits from growing an owned audience for later monetization
• Brand has strong narrative and visual identity

Worst fits

• Audiences that rarely share content publicly
• Heavily regulated or sensitive categories where sharing is unlikely
• No capture in place. Spikes are wasted

3) Users create → Company distributes

What it is

Users produce the content. You curate and distribute it on surfaces you control. Think review galleries, template marketplaces, public Q&A, and community knowledge bases surfaced through browse pages and SEO.

Common examples

Etsy listings surfaced by category and search, Stack Overflow Q&A indexed and organized, Product Hunt daily lists, G2 category pages, Notion template gallery.

Advantages

• Creation scales with your user base
• Evergreen browse and SEO can compound
• Social proof improves conversion across the funnel

Disadvantages

• Cold start without seeding and curation
• Quality varies unless you set prompts and standards
• Incentives matter. Creation dries up without visible payoff

Best fits

• Market compares options or hunts for examples
• Product naturally produces artifacts worth listing or reading
• Model benefits from discovery traffic and assisted conversion
• Brand can act as a trusted curator

Worst fits

• No clear reason for users to contribute
• Outcomes are highly bespoke and not browsable
• Heavy moderation burden with no resources to curate

4) Users create → Users distribute

What it is

Users produce and share or embed outputs elsewhere. Your brand rides along. Think public pages, branded exports, badges, and embeddable widgets.

Common examples

GitHub repos and gists shared across the web, Figma Community files shared peer-to-peer, Spotify podcast players embedded on sites, CodePen embeds, Substack posts shared by writers.

Advantages

• Always-on organic reach at near-zero marginal cost
• Retention benefit as users display progress or work
• Long-tail discovery when embeds and public pages persist

Disadvantages

• Very low intent per impression
• Attribution is messy and slow
• Over-branding can reduce adoption and sharing

Best fits

• Product outputs are useful or show-worthy to a user’s audience
• Simple, one-click sharing or embed flow
• Model can monetize longer, low-intent paths
• Brand is comfortable being subtle on third-party surfaces

Worst fits

• Nothing meaningful to share or embed
• Strict compliance constraints on external display
• Sharing would harm user privacy or competitive posture

Virality-led acquisition motion

At its core, virality means that growth is driven by users of a product spreading the word and inviting others to use the product as well.

People often assume that virality is simply word of mouth. But there are actually several forms of virality. We'll examine the two major categories:

• Incentivized virality: As the name suggests, this is when users get an incentive (e.g., money, product features, exclusive content) in exchange for inviting others to the product. The referral programs ("invite a friend and get $10") made famous by the likes of Dropbox, Airbnb, and Paypal are all examples of incentivized virality.
• Organic virality: Organic virality can be broken down into a few different sub-categories:
  1. Word of mouth: Good ol'-fashioned word of mouth is a classic type of organic virality. Users love a product so much that they invite their friends and family. Word of mouth takes place outside of the product experience.
  2. Pull virality: This is when users of a product invite others because doing so increases the value they get out of the product. Slack, or pretty much any other collaboration tool, is a great example of this. For someone to truly get the full value out of Slack, they need their co-workers to join as well. So users "pull" in others to maximize their own utility. Pull virality applies to every social media platform, too. Instagram isn't much fun if you're the only one using it.
  3. Push virality: Push virality involves existing users exposing (not inviting) others to the product through natural usage. This applies to both physical and digital products. Every time someone walks around wearing their AirPods, they're exposing the product to other potential customers. On the digital side, take Superhuman, an email service. Every time a Superhuman user sends an email, it says "sent via Superhuman" in the footer. Again, the users aren't directly inviting their contacts to Superhuman. But they are creating awareness each time they use it.

Advantages

• Super low cost
• Scalable
• Leverages the most trusted way people buy: recommendations from their friends

Disadvantages

• Very difficult to get right
• Hard to control or influence
• Requires a critical mass of people to take effect

Company types that work best

• Products that gain utility with every new user (e.g., networks, social products)
• Products that are innately fun or social
• Products that are simple with a broad appeal

Sales-led acquisition motion

Sales doesn’t need much of an introduction. It consists of two parts:

1. Lead generation: Lead generation is the act of searching for people or businesses that fall into your target audience. The goal of lead generation is to identify a prospective customer and find a channel to directly reach them through. Once a "lead" has been identified, it's then passed to the direct sales team to make first contact. Lead generation is typically done through content marketing, paid marketing, or cold outreach.
2. Direct sales: Direct sales is the process of turning leads into customers. Direct sales can happen over the phone, in person, and sometimes over email. It often involves educating and negotiating with a prospect until a deal is finalized.

Advantages

• Allows for very niche targeting at scale
• You can create systems that lead to a repeatable and predictable acquisition engine
• Unlike other channels, messaging can be tailored in real time, which can lead to a higher likelihood of closing a sale
• You're able to develop a personal relationship with your prospective customer
• Allows you to explain your product in great detail

Disadvantages

• Very expensive
• Requires constant hiring, training, and up-skilling of your sales team

Company types that work best

• Products with long or complex sales cycles
• Expensive products
• Products that require training to use
• Products that require custom quotes or configurations