Your customer acquisition strategy just changed forever

 This Week’s Essay

For the past 15 years, the growth playbook was simple.

Google. Facebook. SEO. Paid ads.

Capture intent. Buy attention. Optimize conversion.

The companies that executed best, won. Full stop.

That era is over.

Not slowly fading out — actually over. Because the way people discover things online is being rebuilt from scratch, and most founders haven’t fully processed what that means for their business.

Here’s what changed.

The old internet was built around navigation. You searched, clicked around, compared options, made a decision. Every acquisition channel — SEO, paid ads, marketplaces — was designed around that behavior.

AI blew that up entirely.

Instead of ten links to browse → you get one answer.

Instead of a funnel you move through → you’re in a conversation the AI controls.

Instead of comparing and deciding → the AI recommends, and you probably just go with it.

The user isn’t navigating the internet anymore.

The internet is being interpreted for them.

Which means the game shifted.

You’re not competing for clicks.

You’re competing for inclusion.

There’s a new game. Most companies don’t know they’re already losing it.

It’s called Generative Engine Optimization.

SEO = rank in links.

GEO = get included in answers.

Old world: you optimized your website. The content, the metadata, the backlink architecture — all pointing back to a page you controlled.

New world: AI systems pull from third-party sources. Citations. Authoritative mentions. Voices the model has learned to trust. It’s not reading your homepage. It’s reading everything written about you, referencing you, citing you, across the web.

The asset is no longer your website. It’s everywhere your brand is mentioned.

A podcast appearance, a quote in someone else’s essay, a mention in a thread you weren’t even part of — this is the new SEO. Third-party validation, the thing that used to sit in the “nice to have” bucket, is now the primary acquisition lever.

The story was always valuable. In the GEO world, it’s existential.

Performance marketing is a treadmill.

Between 2023 and 2025, customer acquisition costs jumped 40–60% across most industries. Not because anyone got worse at running ads. Because everyone got better at the same time — and the platforms captured the surplus.

Every efficiency gain gets absorbed back into the auction. CPMs rise. The algorithm reprices. The faster you run, the faster the belt moves.

Counterintuitively — your campaigns can be performing better than ever (CTRs up, CVRs improving, creative sharper than it’s ever been) and still deliver worse unit economics than mediocre campaigns did three years ago.

Wild, right? But that’s exactly how this works.

Google and Meta are profit-maximizing machines. Their entire incentive is to capture as much of your efficiency gain as the market will bear. Get better at their system → they reprice. Everyone gets better → they reprice faster.

The house always wins.

And now AI has automated the optimization itself. Targeting, bidding, creative testing — the machine handles all of it. The last remaining advantage — knowing how to run the system better than your competitors — is gone.

Companies still betting their growth on paid acquisition efficiency are making a structural mistake. They’re optimizing a variable they don’t control, inside a system whose incentives are not theirs.

So what actually works?

There’s a fundamental difference between channels you rent and channels you own.

Paid media is rent. Stop paying → traffic stops. Zero residual value. Zero compounding. You’re perpetually paying for the same audience at prices that only go up.

Proprietary channels are relationships. They don’t stop when the budget runs out. They deepen over time. And in the AI era — relationships are the only thing that can’t be repriced by someone else’s algorithm.

The companies winning on acquisition aren’t spending less. They’re spending differently and investing in assets instead of renting attention.

What actually compounds:

Email and newsletters — you own the list. No algorithm between you and your audience. Economics improve as the list grows.

Niche podcasting and long-form video — the only medium that builds genuine trust at scale. Compounds in the GEO world. Generates a flywheel of short-form content that feeds discovery and narrative simultaneously.

Organic LinkedIn — where thought leadership and conversion still happen for founders who get the formats: video, carousels, non-conventional POVs that stop the scroll.

Community — the only channel that both retains and recruits. People connected by the same values don’t leave when a competitor offers better terms. They give you another chance. That loyalty can’t be bought. It has to be built through genuine investment — online and offline — before you need anything back.

None of these are fast. All of them compound. Unlike paid, the value doesn’t disappear the moment you stop spending.

Distribution precedes product.

This is the most counterintuitive growth insight right now — and consumer brands figured it out before anyone else.

Kim Kardashian didn’t launch Skims hoping paid ads would carve out a niche. She converted hundreds of millions of existing followers into customers. The distribution existed before the product did.

Fenty Beauty didn’t need a launch campaign — Rihanna’s cultural authority meant it sold out within hours.

Alex Cooper built Call Her Daddy into one of the most-listened podcasts in the world — then launched Unwell with a built-in audience already waiting. She didn’t go find customers. She converted listeners she already owned.

The most defensible asset you can build is an audience that trusts you before you ask them to buy anything. Not a product. Not a feature. An audience.

In the AI era, this is even more urgent. AI doesn’t discover you when you launch. It references you based on everything that existed before you launched. Haven’t built an audience before you need one? You’re already late.

Start before you’re ready. Write before you have a product. Build in public before you have anything to sell. The discourse you enter today is the distribution you unlock tomorrow.

Dark social is the most underrated channel nobody is measuring.

Up to 80% of content sharing happens out of sight of traditional analytics tools. The group chat. The WhatsApp thread. The Slack DM where someone says “have you seen this?” before a purchase decision gets made.

A private share is fundamentally different from a like or a retweet. When someone forwards something in a private conversation, they’re putting their own reputation on the line. Telling someone they respect — “this is worth your time.”

That’s the highest trust signal in marketing. And it cannot be bought.

It can only be earned. Three ways:

Specificity. Content that travels in dark social is never broad. It speaks so precisely to one type of person that they immediately think of someone they need to forward it to.

Courage to be unpopular publicly. Dark social thrives on the contrarian take, the uncomfortable truth, the thing everyone knows but nobody publishes. That tension — “I can’t believe they said this” — is the engine of private sharing.

Community. WhatsApp groups, Slack communities, Discord servers, intimate founder circles. The brands that show up consistently — answering questions, sharing what they know, being useful before they need anything — become the ones mentioned when someone asks for a recommendation. You don’t build dark social reach by broadcasting. You build it by being present in the rooms where your people already gather.

Stop asking “how do we get more traffic?” Start asking: are we the thing people send each other?

The biggest misconception about AI and growth is that it creates new channels.

It doesn’t.

What it does is collapse the distance between reputation and revenue. The companies that built narrative, owned their audiences, and showed up in the discourse before they needed anything from it — they’re not just better positioned. They’re playing a completely different game.

Most companies haven’t noticed yet. Still optimizing the same channels, measuring the same metrics, running the same playbook that worked five years ago. The numbers still move. The results still look okay.

But the new rules are being written as we speak — and I promise you, they’re not being written by the companies still arguing about CPMs.

The ones who rebuild now — around inclusion not clicks, ownership not rent, reputation not reach — will compound at a rate the performance marketing crowd simply cannot match.

It’s wild when you zoom out.

An entire generation of founders built their instincts around a set of rules that are now being rewritten in real time. The channels changed. The discovery changed. The relationship between brand and customer changed.

We don’t get a timeout to figure it out. We figure it out while the game is being played.

That’s the job right now. And honestly — I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

 This Week’s Number

 69%

The share of Google searches that now end without a single click. Before AI Overviews launched, it was 56%. In less than a year, the majority of searches stopped sending traffic anywhere.

Community Picks

Five people who saw this coming.

1. Andrew Chen — General Partner, a16z

“Paid acquisition is a tax on your product’s defensibility. The moment you can’t out-spend the incumbents and competitors, you die. Build channels that get cheaper as you grow or you’re just renting your growth.”

2. Yamini Rangan — CEO, HubSpot 

“The top of the funnel has scattered. Buyers used to start with content on your website. Now they are everywhere but your website.”

3. Lenny Rachitsky — Founder, Lenny’s Newsletter

“I’ve tried everything — paid ads, SEO, biz dev — and none of it really did a damn thing. Word of mouth was the biggest lever.”

4. Alex Cooper — Founder, Unwell / Call Her Daddy

“I am a CEO and I’m a podcaster. But all of that wouldn’t be successful if I wasn’t a marketer. Every single day I’m thinking about how can I push my podcast, my movies, my consumer products. None of it would be as successful if I wasn’t thinking with my marketing cap at all times.”

5. Tyler Denk — CEO, Beehiiv

“Publishers who were overly dependent on Google suddenly seeing they’re getting a fraction of the traffic — you start to see the power of being able to hit send to your 100,000 readers.”

What I’m Loving 

Three things worth your time this week.

1. Clouded Judgement: Digital Twins — Jamin Ball

Every week Jamin Ball writes the most data-driven newsletter on AI and SaaS. This week’s piece explores digital twins — AI replicas of people, processes, or systems that could become one of the most important concepts in the next wave of enterprise AI. Required reading for anyone investing in or building on the next infrastructure layer.

Read it here

2. The Burnouts: Alex Cooper — What Nobody Knows

Alex Cooper built a multi-hundred million dollar media empire starting with a microphone and a co-host she eventually had to fire. In this episode she breaks down what actually happened behind the $60M Spotify deal and the $125M SiriusXM deal — what she negotiated, what she walked away from, and why she turned down more money from Amazon. But the real gold is what she shares about building on top of distribution: how audience trust became the foundation for Unwell’s creative agency, consumer products, live events, and TV/film arm. The lesson that stuck: the deals don’t create the empire. The audience creates the deals. Distribution is the asset. Everything else is the return on it.

Listen here

3. Inside the New Media Team — The a16z Show

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on why a16z built a full media operation inside one of the world’s most powerful VC firms. Why individuals now matter more than corporate brands. Why offense beats defense. And why the firms that control the narrative will win the deals. 46 minutes that put a VC lens on everything this essay argues.

Watch here

Thanks for reading,

Olga 

 P.S. If this issue was valuable to you please share it with a founder who needs to hear it. Let’s build LATAM’s next tech leaders—together

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