Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

The #1 Marketing Channel at $500k in Revenue

5 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:47

In this concise monologue, Ryan Deiss rapidly evaluates a range of customer acquisition channels—paid social, YouTube, referrals, partnerships, cold outreach, events, podcasting, and short‑form content—consistently concluding that email outperforms every other option. He argues that email delivers the highest return on investment, serving both as an outreach tool and a nurturing platform. For small, early‑stage businesses, he stresses that building an email list and mastering email outreach and nurturing is the single most critical activity for generating sales and scaling to substantial revenue.

Chapters

Is it paid social or SEO? Paid social. Paid social or YouTube? Ah, I'm still gonna give the nod to paid social, but YouTube's pretty good. Paid social or email? Email. Email or referrals? Email. Email or partnerships? Email. Email or cold outreach? Ah, I mean, cold outreach I guess kinda is email, but I'm still gonna give the nod to email as a whole, both from an outreach and from a nurturing standpoint. Email or events? Email. Email or podcasting? Email. Email or short form? Email. Email is going to win. There is no higher return on investment channel than email. And when your business is small and you're just getting started, this is the thing that you must optimize. Because if you can get people on your list and you can sell them, you can build a business.