Separate saturation from mismatch. A channel that saturated needs a different channel; a channel that never fitted the economics was never working, it was subsidised by something else.
6 tools across 2 of the 9 questions
The constraint that revenue per user and purchase frequency determine which acquisition channels a business can afford at all.
Breaks when Early on you do not know real ARPU or retention, so the arithmetic runs on optimistic estimates. Balfour gives no dollar thresholds — any you see attached to this are someone's invention.
Reach peopleA screening procedure that ranks nineteen acquisition channels, cheap-tests three, and concentrates effort on the one that works.
Breaks when The list froze in 2015, and the method needs test budget and traffic to run at all. Very early on you need one bet, not a survey.
Reach peopleA model of acquisition in which the output of each cycle becomes the input of the next, as opposed to a funnel refilled from outside.
Breaks when Not every business has a loop. Forcing one produces a north-star metric that measures the wrong thing.
Reach peopleThe modelled carry-over of advertising effect after exposure, combined with the falling return on each additional unit of spend.
Breaks when Decay half-life and saturation point are estimated from data. With thin data they are effectively invented, and the model then confirms its own assumption.
Allocate budgetThe prescription, following from buyer-base structure, to reach as many category buyers as possible as continuously as possible rather than concentrating on heavy buyers.
Breaks when Inverts where the buyer universe is genuinely small and enumerable — a 300-account B2B list is a case where targeting really does pay.
Reach peopleTreating the right to send someone a message as granted by them and revocable, and building an asset out of the grants rather than out of purchased attention.
Breaks when The permission is largely an artefact of the form. Consent rates move sharply with the default and the wording of the request while the offer stays identical, so a list measures the checkout design rather than anticipation, and a large permission asset can contain almost no intent. It is also capped by construction: everyone on the list already found you, which makes it a retention instrument routinely presented as a growth one.
Reach people