Business strategy

Startup social media: choose a channel that brings buyers

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim compare organic posts, paid ads and influencers, with different approaches for consumer apps and business customers.

10 October 20262 min read7 min listen

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In 2026, the biggest threat to your startup isn't actually a lack of technical skill. It's a lack of strategic alignment between your product and your marketing channel.

Editor's note

Why this matters now

How Does This Get Big? asks what a startup's social media is supposed to achieve. A consumer app needs a different plan from software sold to a business.

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim compare posts you make yourself, paid ads and creator partnerships. The useful thread is who sees the product and how that person buys.

For your next marketing test, the audience matters before the format. A popular clip can still leave you with very little information about whether the people watching need your app.

The source

What it says

Distilled from the original. The notes above and below are the editor's own.

Match the channel to the buyer

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim discuss social media marketing through the kinds of customers a startup needs to reach.

A consumer may discover an app while scrolling through entertaining videos. A business buyer may need a more focused explanation, a trusted recommendation or a conversation about a particular job.

The founders use that distinction to compare three approaches: organic posts, paid advertising and influencer partnerships.

Organic posts can be an early test

They recommend making content yourself when the business is still learning how to explain its product and who responds to it.

This limits cash spending, but it still takes time and practice. The founders point to their own early videos as work they improved through repeated attempts.

Track what a viewer does after seeing the offer. Views alone cannot tell you whether the product has paying customers.

Paid advertising makes the spending visible

Paid ads can reach more people quickly. The founders caution that money can disappear just as quickly if too few of those people buy or remain customers.

They discuss the cost of acquiring a customer alongside the revenue that customer brings over time. Both numbers matter before increasing a budget.

A creator partnership needs the right audience

The founders distinguish broad consumer exposure from a recommendation reaching a concentrated group of professional buyers.

Their examples include partnerships and posts that worked well for particular offers. Those stories depend on the product, the audience and the price of a customer relationship. They are examples to examine, with no guaranteed return for your next campaign.

Businesses may pay for help doing the work

Meng and Kim also discuss offering a service using their software. Some customers want help producing the finished marketing work, which requires decisions and execution alongside access to a tool.

They describe experimenting with that approach themselves. It is a question for a founder to test: does the customer want software to operate, or help delivering a result?

Turn the advice into one test

Choose an audience you can reach and an offer you can explain. Set a spending limit and count the actions that matter to your business.

The episode's platform suggestions reflect the founders' experience at the time of recording. Use current results from your own customers when deciding what to expand.

Editor's note

What to do with this

Choose one customer group and one channel for a small test. Make the offer easy to understand, then count product visits, trials and purchases alongside views.

Keep any paid experiment small enough to learn from a disappointing result. The founders' campaign stories describe particular businesses and offers. Hear their own Yorby growth account for the spending decisions behind their advice, including experiments they found disappointing.

Find more from the show in our startup-growth playlist.

The original

The 3 Types Of Social Media Marketing Strategies Startups Need To Know

How Does This Get Big? · 29 September 2026