How did you figure out your main customer acquisition path in the messy middle?

[ZacharyH]

I’m about six months into my first real venture, and honestly, I’m starting to feel stuck. We have a decent product and a handful of loyal customers, but growth has completely stalled. I keep hearing I need to find a scalable customer acquisition channel, but everything I try feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall. How did you figure out your main path to reaching people when you were in this messy middle phase?

[Addison40]

In the messy middle, most founders don’t discover a scalable customer acquisition channel by luck. They usually find it by identifying the main bottleneck first: activation, retention, or trust.
A practical way to do this is to map the entire funnel and pick one metric that is clearly broken, like onboarding time or activation rate. Then run a focused two-week experiment on a single customer acquisition channel. If a channel improves activation or retention, it’s worth scaling. If not, the issue is often product-market fit rather than distribution.

[NoraZM]

When growth stalls, I try to avoid guessing and focus on small experiments. Define one clear hypothesis, for example: “This customer acquisition channel will increase activation by 15% in two weeks.”
Tag cohorts, run the test, and compare results. The goal isn’t to find a perfect channel, but to learn quickly which inputs actually move startup growth metrics.

[Luke57]

It’s worth asking whether the real problem is acquisition or retention. Many early-stage startups chase new channels when users are quietly churning because the value isn’t fully delivered yet. If users don’t reach a “must-have” moment, no customer acquisition channel will scale sustainably.

[EmmaD]

Sometimes the scalable path isn’t a classic channel at all. Partnerships, referrals, or trust signals can outperform paid acquisition once the product solves a real problem. Growth often appears where users rely on each other, not just where ads are optimized.

[Kyle36]

One simple exercise that helped me was writing a short story about a day in the life of a real customer using the product. It revealed gaps in messaging, onboarding, and expectations. Hearing the words customers actually use can clarify where acquisition and product value are misaligned.

[Olivia.B]

In many cases, early-stage startup growth doesn’t stall because founders chose the wrong customer acquisition channel. It stalls because the product hasn’t yet created enough clear, repeatable value.
Channels amplify what already works. Fix the core, and the right channel often becomes obvious.

[Avery.J]

Curious how others identified their main customer acquisition channel in the messy middle. What finally unlocked growth for you?