Wealthfront CEO Andy Rachleff on why advertising spend makes it harder to find product/market fit

You don't advertise, you don't advertise on tv. You do hardly any paid acquisition of users. Why not?

Well, I think that it can actually distract you. The way that, you know you have product market fit is if you have exponential organic growth. That's not an easy thing to do. And advertising can actually make you think you're doing well because you're buying customers, when in fact you're not. So the only way you drive exponential organic growth is through word of mouth. So when I came back as CEO, I got rid of almost all the advertising. There's a Japanese saying in manufacturing that you can't see the rocks until you drain all the water. So by getting rid of the advertising, we could actually see if we were driving exponential organic growth. The great products, the great companies were all built through word of mouth and through great product. So that's why we try to reinforce the business model. We've chosen to have a lot of engineers and product focused people because if we can delight our clients, delight is the greatest form of virality.