Making waves 🌊 vs catching waves 🏄

Startups often fall into one of two categories: those exceptional at making waves and those that excel at catching waves. The former captivate the media by evangelizing their innovations, while the latter are revenue machines, capitalizing on existing market demand. The optimal strategy incorporates both, laying the foundation for sustainable growth.

Generating Demand: The Power of Making Waves

Making waves involves generating fresh demand. By targeting individuals in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) who aren't actively seeking your solution, you educate them about your offering and potentially even the problem they didn't know they had. This strategy requires a distinct skill set centered on storytelling, content creation, and relationship-building.

• Primary acquisition channels: PR, Community Building, Events, (Top of the Funnel) Social Ads, Display Ads, Media, Outbound.

• Pros: Bigger scale (even 95-97% of the market), increased brand defensibility.

• Cons: Lengthy time to result, diminished ROI, scalability challenges.

Capturing Demand: The Art of Catching Waves

Catching waves is about capturing pre-existing demand. It ensures that those in the market for your product can easily find you and engage in a seamless transaction, often via your website or sales team. This approach demands expertise in channel-specific knowledge, along with strong analytical and technical skills.

• Primary acquisition channels: SEM & SEO (Transactional and Commercial Investigation Intent), Marketplaces, Bottom of the Funnel Social & Display Ads, Direct Sales.

• Monetization channels: Website, Sales Processes, Marketing Automation.

• Pros: Rapid results (especially via PPC), high ROI, scalability.

• Cons: Targets a narrow slice of demand (3-5%), limited efficacy in saturated markets, vulnerability to imitation.

Crafting a Balanced Strategy

Here is my recipe for prioritizing demand capture vs demand generation:

1. If you start from scratch, go for Demand Capture first: This plugs gaps in your acquisition funnel and ensures a steady flow of leads and revenue.
2. If your Demand Capture works, add Demand Generation: Once the capture side is solid, layer on demand-generation strategies for long-term, sustainable customer growth.
3. If your Demand Generation works, add Demand Capture: If your company is already proficient at making waves, the focus should be on setting up effective demand capture to monetize this existing awareness and engagement.

In all scenarios, the objective is to create a diversified, effective channel mix that ensures both rapid and sustainable growth

Case Studies

Omnipack: Since we began working with Omnipack in 2017, the company's ARR has grown from zero to over $12M. Initially, we focused on pure demand capture: Google Ads targeting transactional phrases to drive traffic to a landing page featuring an interactive form. Leads were then processed by their sales team. Although we experimented with social ads and outbound marketing, these channels were not as successful as SEM at the time. As the company scaled, it diversified its strategy, incorporating many demand-generation activities via channels like SEO, events, partnerships, content, and PR.

Pomelody: Already skilled in demand generation with vibrant communities on social platforms, they lacked in demand capture. We used Meta Ads to drive traffic from their communities, warmed by timed discounts, and converted them through a newly-created e-commerce platform. Results included breaking even at 64k PLN (circa $15k) in the third month and reaching 400k PLN (circa $95k) by the fifteenth month.

By mastering both making and catching waves, startups can position themselves for both immediate and long-term success.