Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last month, I watched a client burn through $15,000 in Facebook ads with barely any conversions to show for it. The ads looked great, the targeting seemed spot-on, and the product? Solid. Yet their cost per acquisition was through the roof and their trial signup rates were abysmal.
The problem wasn't their product or even their ads. It was something most founders never hear about: product channel fit.
While everyone obsesses over product-market fit, there's this massive blind spot around whether your product actually works on the channels you're trying to use. You can have the best SaaS in the world, but if you're trying to sell a complex B2B tool through TikTok ads, you're going to have a bad time.
Through working with dozens of startups and e-commerce brands, I've learned that product channel fit is often the difference between sustainable growth and expensive marketing disasters. Most businesses are playing the wrong game entirely.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience helping companies find their channel-product sweet spot:
Why your awesome product might be fundamentally incompatible with paid ads
The three-step framework I use to audit product-channel alignment
Real case studies of when I've had to completely pivot channel strategies
How to identify which channels will actually work for your specific business model
The hidden costs of forcing the wrong channel-product combination
Industry Reality
What every startup founder gets told about marketing channels
Here's the standard advice every startup gets about growth and marketing:
"Test every channel. Diversify your marketing. Follow the data." Sounds reasonable, right? The typical playbook goes like this:
Build your product
Create some landing pages
Test Facebook ads, Google ads, content marketing, and LinkedIn
Double down on whatever gets the best ROAS
Scale the winner
Every marketing guru, every growth hacking course, every startup accelerator preaches this approach. And honestly? It makes sense on paper.
The problem is this advice treats all products like they're the same. It assumes that if you just optimize your targeting, write better ad copy, or improve your landing pages, any product can work on any channel. The entire performance marketing industry is built on this assumption.
This conventional wisdom exists because it's easier to sell "universal growth tactics" than to admit that some products are fundamentally incompatible with certain channels. Marketing agencies want to believe they can make anything work with the right strategy. Founders want to believe they can hack their way to growth without changing their core approach.
But here's where this breaks down in the real world: Your product's complexity, price point, buying journey, and target customer behavior determine which channels can actually work. No amount of optimization can overcome a fundamental channel-product mismatch.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
A few months ago, I started working with an e-commerce client who had built something pretty cool: a catalog with over 1,000 unique products across multiple categories. Quality stuff, good margins, decent traffic from their existing customer base.
They came to me because their Facebook ads were generating a 2.5 ROAS, which most marketers would call "acceptable." But with their margins, they were barely breaking even. Plus, the ads that did convert were mostly for their 3-4 bestselling items – the other 996+ products might as well have been invisible.
My first instinct was typical consultant thinking: "Let's optimize the hell out of these ads." Better targeting, more creative variations, different audiences. We tried everything. The ROAS improved slightly, but not enough to make the economics work.
That's when I realized we had a fundamental product-channel mismatch. Facebook ads work great for products that can be sold quickly with minimal browsing. Think of those impulse purchase ads – you see the product, you want it, you buy it within 30 seconds.
But this client's strength was their variety. Customers needed time to browse, compare, discover products they didn't know they wanted. The shopping behavior their business model required was completely incompatible with the quick-decision environment of social media advertising.
The more I dug into their analytics, the clearer it became. Their organic customers had completely different behavior patterns. They'd browse multiple product pages, spend 5-10 minutes on the site, often return multiple times before purchasing. These weren't impulse buyers – they were deliberate researchers.
Meanwhile, the Facebook ad traffic would land on a product page, spend 30 seconds max, and bounce. Even when they did buy, it was typically the exact product from the ad, not the discovery shopping journey the business was optimized for.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I recognized this was a channel-product mismatch rather than an optimization problem, I completely pivoted our approach. Instead of trying to force their complex catalog through the Facebook ads funnel, I focused on channels that rewarded discovery and browsing behavior.
Step 1: SEO Strategy Overhaul
I shifted almost all our energy toward SEO and organic content. We restructured the entire website around search intent rather than social media conversion. Every product category got its own landing page optimized for long-tail keywords. We created buying guides, comparison pages, and educational content.
The difference was immediate. SEO traffic naturally aligned with their browsing-heavy business model. People searching for specific products were already in a research mindset. They expected to spend time on the site, read descriptions, compare options.
Step 2: Channel-Product Audit Framework
This experience made me develop a systematic way to evaluate channel-product fit before wasting money on misaligned strategies. I now use three key criteria:
Decision Timeline: How long does your customer typically take to decide? If it's weeks or months, paid ads are probably wrong.
Discovery vs. Intent: Are customers looking for your specific product, or do they need to discover what they want? Discovery needs content and SEO.
Price Complexity: Higher prices and complex value propositions don't work in fast-scroll environments.
Step 3: Content-First Distribution
Instead of interruption marketing (ads), we built attraction marketing. Blog content that ranked for buying-intent keywords. Product pages optimized for organic discovery. Email sequences that nurtured browsers into buyers over time.
The economics completely flipped. Organic traffic had 3x higher average order values, 60% longer session durations, and customers who actually explored the full catalog instead of just buying the one product they saw in an ad.
Step 4: Attribution Reality Check
Here's where it gets interesting. Within two months of launching the SEO strategy, Facebook's attribution reporting started showing ROAS numbers of 8-9x. Most marketers would celebrate this "improved ad performance."
But I knew better. What was really happening: SEO was driving significant traffic and conversions, but Facebook's attribution model was claiming credit for organic wins. The customer journey was actually: Google search → website visit → retargeting ad exposure → purchase. Facebook got the credit, but SEO did the heavy lifting.
This taught me that attribution lies, but channel-product fit doesn't. When you get the channel right, everything else becomes easier.
Channel Physics
Each channel has rules you can't change – you can only decide how your product plays within them
Customer Journey
Map how your customers actually buy, not how you want them to buy
Economics Test
Calculate real profitability per channel, including hidden costs like ad management time
Attribution Clarity
Separate correlation from causation in your performance data – just because an ad gets credit doesn't mean it drove the sale
The results from this channel pivot were dramatic and sustainable. Within six months:
Organic traffic increased 400% through targeted SEO and content strategy
Average order value improved 65% because customers were discovering complementary products
Customer acquisition cost dropped 70% when we stopped forcing the wrong channel
Customer lifetime value increased because organic customers showed higher retention
But the most important metric was this: the business became profitable. Instead of burning money on ads that barely worked, every dollar spent on content and SEO had compound returns. The client could finally scale without constantly worrying about unit economics.
The lesson here isn't that Facebook ads are bad – it's that they were wrong for this specific product and business model. I've seen other clients absolutely crush it with paid social because their products naturally fit that channel's constraints.
What matters is honest assessment of your product-channel fit before you commit serious time and money to any marketing strategy.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience fundamentally changed how I approach marketing strategy for every new client. Here are the key insights that now guide my decision-making:
Channel-product fit trumps everything else. You can't optimize your way out of a fundamental mismatch. Better to find the right channel than perfect the wrong one.
Customer behavior doesn't change. If your customers like to browse and research, build a strategy around that. Don't try to force them into impulse purchase patterns.
Attribution is often fiction. Most marketing tools want to take credit for conversions they didn't actually drive. Trust the economics more than the reports.
Economics reveal truth. When you get channel-product fit right, the unit economics just work. When you get it wrong, you'll be constantly fighting uphill battles.
Distribution strategy is product strategy. How your customers find and buy your product is part of your core business model, not an afterthought.
Test channel fit early. Don't wait until you've burned significant budget to realize you're on the wrong channel. Do small tests to understand customer behavior first.
One aligned channel beats three misaligned ones. It's better to dominate one channel that works than to spread resources across multiple channels that sort of work.
The biggest mistake I see startups make is trying to force their product through whatever channel seems cheapest or easiest to execute. The most expensive marketing is the kind that doesn't work, regardless of the upfront cost.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Match your trial complexity to channel decision speed
B2B tools usually need content marketing, not social ads
Focus on channels where you can demonstrate expertise, not just features
For your Ecommerce store
For E-commerce stores:
Simple products work on paid social; complex catalogs need SEO strategies
Match your inventory depth to customer browsing behavior
Don't force discovery shopping through impulse purchase channels