Matt Ryder argues most businesses waste money on paid ads because they haven't built an offer people actually want. Paid ads mask weak positioning and commoditized products. Fix your offer first, then scale.
You really don't have to do paid ads. Paid ads are sort of a solution to either massively scale or to subsidize having a kind of a shit offer. Most businesses do not need paid ads to be quite successful, and I'm going to give some examples of that. People lean into it way too heavily, but what they don't really understand is how to position an offer that is going to be wanted and needed by the marketplace. Or they don't know how to establish need in the marketplace, and that's where they struggle. Or they get commoditized and then they have to do tons of paid advertising. That's when margins start to blow out and stuff like that. And so, like marketers who rely a lot on paid ads just aren't very good at marketing.
