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.

Increasing ad spend to meet growth targets can backfire, as it often leads to longer payback periods for customer acquisition, making it harder to sustain growth.

As a startup grows, the focus shifts from just acquiring users to ensuring sustainable growth and revenue. We learned the hard way that even if users love our product, we must also pay attention to our overall growth metrics to avoid becoming a beloved startup that fails due to lack of financial viability.

The customer acquisition cost (CAC) must be lower than the revenue generated from a user to ensure sustainable growth.

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.

To avoid disruption from lower-cost competitors, it's vital to understand customer perspectives and ensure that the business model is sustainable and capable of delivering value over time. I think it's important to have a growth mindset and be humble, whether in front of customers or internally. When meeting with a customer, we should be there to learn about their problems, not to teach them how to do things.

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.

It's important for founders to understand that the perception of needing to grow rapidly can lead to poor decision-making, such as overspending or neglecting financial health.

It's important to maintain frugality and avoid the unconscious pressure to overspend after raising funds, as this can lead to a bloated company structure and increased financial demands. To successfully scale a startup, you need to raise money while maintaining discipline, scrappiness, and frugality.