Startups don't need more campaigns. They need one channel that works.

Once you have evidence that people want the product - early retention, organic word of mouth, or manual sales you can repeat - and you need to turn that into a predictable channel. Hiring an agency to manufacture demand for a product with no pull is the most common way early-stage marketing budget disappears.

Enough to reach statistical signal on one channel rather than a thin spread across four. In practice that usually means a test budget sized to produce at least 30-50 conversions in the learning window, concentrated on the single channel that best matches how your buyers currently look for a solution.

Start with Google when people already search for the problem you solve - existing demand is cheaper to capture than demand you have to create. Start with Meta when the category is new, visual, or impulse-driven and buyers do not yet know to search for it. Most startups should prove one before adding the other.

Customer acquisition cost against contribution margin, payback period, and the ratio of the two over time. Impressions, clicks, and even ROAS in isolation can look healthy while the business loses money on every order - the metrics that matter connect spend to unit economics.

They solve different problems. A first in-house hire gives you daily ownership but usually a single skill set. An agency gives you several senior disciplines at once without a full salary, which suits the stage where you are still discovering which channel works. Many startups use an agency to find the channel, then hire in-house to run it.

Sometimes, but honestly: if there is no evidence of demand yet, paid acquisition is usually the wrong first investment. In those cases we will say so and point at positioning and audience validation work instead - spending media budget to test a product thesis is an expensive way to learn something cheaper research would tell you.