Ask a founder how they'll grow and you'll usually get a list of channels: paid social, some LinkedIn, a podcast, a few influencers, maybe TikTok. It sounds ambitious. According to Ranbir, founder of portfolio company Oneday, who delivered one of the best-reviewed session of our first Founder Studio programme, it's also a good way to learn nothing about what works.
Ranbir has scaled a consumer app to many millions of downloads and now runs Oneday, an education company that grows mainly through paid acquisition. His session was less about growth hacks than about how to decide what to test and when.
Start with your stage
Most founders treat growth as a menu. If a channel isn't working, try another; if one is, add more. Ranbir starts somewhere else: what stage are you at? The right question for a company that hasn't found product-market fit is different from the right one for a company with several million in revenue, and optimising the wrong one wastes time and money.
Before PMF, the job is finding the problem: a deep pain, an audience big enough and reachable enough, and a solution that works. Run basic demand tests and leave channels and funnels alone for now.
From PMF up to roughly $5M in revenue, the job is to get one thing working. One channel, one persona, one funnel, and the work is in formats, angles and conversion. Adding channels before the first has scaled just spreads you thin.
After $5M you can widen out into new channels, funnels, personas and geographies, and past $30–100M the whole range opens up, including new solutions and neighbouring problems.
Founders tend to mix these up. They tune channels before they've found a pain worth solving, or they run five channels when none has been made to work.
Is the problem real?
Ranbir gave two tests. In customer interviews, if you need precise questions to get someone to mention the pain, it isn't deep enough. It should come up on its own from broad questions, and you should avoid leading ones. Then ask how bad it is: broken leg, headache or paper cut? Go after broken legs, where customers are already spending money looking for a fix.
For finding people to talk to he suggested paid interview platforms, which make early research cheap and quick. A basic landing page plus the playbooks of reference companies is enough to test demand, across several angles and channels. The Facebook Ad Library shows any company's public ads, which makes competitor research more straightforward.
Ten bullseyes
Once you're past that, Ranbir uses ten "bullseyes" to decide what to test, the way product teams prioritise a roadmap. Each has three rings: all possible ideas on the outside, ideas you've tested with meaningful spend and decent results in the middle, and proven everyday tactics in the centre. They cover channels, funnels, creative formats, angles, personas, pain points and conversion, among others.
A few principles came out of it. Keep most of your budget in a handful of proven channels and test others at a meaningful scale, with a list of untested ideas waiting, like event sponsorships or partnerships with places your audience already hangs out. Any funnel can plug into any channel, so think of it as a grid. Make lots of different ads, in formats like street interviews, user-generated content, case studies and founder stories. Put the spend behind a couple of winning messages and keep new angles coming.
One rule on reading results matters most. Test a portfolio of angles on each channel and don't hang everything on one superstar ad. A channel only counts as working if several angles work on it. If only one does, you've got a lucky creative.
Conversion improves slowly
Conversion rate rewards patience, Ranbir said. Inside the funnel, his team tried automated messaging at every stage, and a very fast callback, inspired by Alex Hormozi, instead of the usual 20–30 minute wait. Outside it, credibility mattered: books, university partnerships, endorsements, and physical signs that a company is real all help people trust one they've only just met.
Pivoting
His own company got to its current model by iterating. The first product had good downloads and poor retention. The second reached lots of customers but only broke even on the cost of winning and keeping them. The third came from asking customers what would excite them, and people put money down during the research calls. The economics improved a lot.
His advice is to treat pivoting as learning, not failure, and to expect 15 or more before you find PMF. Early on, you know very little of what you'll eventually know, so you should expect your views to change.
Where this doesn't apply
It's a high-ticket, paid-acquisition business, so a framework built on that kind of spend won't transfer neatly to a small budget, a low price point or a long enterprise sales cycle. The session is also mostly about paid growth. Organic social came up as something to test, not as the engine, so read it as a method for testing, not proof that it works.
Some tactics need a harder look before you copy them. AI-generated user content that's indistinguishable from the real thing may perform well, but it raises questions about trust, platform rules and regulation. And "one channel, one persona, one funnel" is a rule for focus. A company with a strong organic or referral engine can sensibly do more.
What to do with it
Before PMF, spend your growth time on the problem: broader interviews, the broken-leg test, simple demand tests. Between PMF and $5M, pick one channel, one persona and one funnel, and work on formats, angles and conversion before adding anything. When you're scaling, draw your own bullseyes, move ideas inwards only after real spend, and judge a channel by whether several angles work.
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