For paid growth, ensure you have revenue before investing in ads, and understand your customer acquisition cost (CAC) versus the lifetime value (LTV) of your users to ensure profitability.

Paid growth involves spending money to acquire users. It's important to ensure that the lifetime value of a customer exceeds the cost of acquiring them, or else the growth strategy may not be sustainable.

It's a common mistake to assume that paid acquisition costs will remain constant; in reality, it often becomes more expensive to find and convert users over time.

The best products are built to optimize for a specific acquisition channel, whether it's paid marketing or SEO, and should be designed with that in mind from the start.

If your product is social in nature, having more users improves the experience, making it essential to focus on virality and referrals.

The best long-term growth strategy is to build a product that users really love, as seen with successful companies like Google and Facebook.

If you build a better product for users, you also end up with a better profit and loss statement and better economics; if users love the platform, your customer acquisition cost is lower and throughput is higher.

Relying solely on paid acquisition for growth is risky. If your growth depends only on ads, it may not be sustainable in the long run, especially as competition increases.

Growth channels are platforms where people discover products, such as Google and social media advertising.