{"id":"2059045647634858329","url":"https://x.com/frydwia/status/2059045647634858329","text":"","author":{"name":"Fryd Wiatrowski","username":"frydwia","avatarUrl":"https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/2057058149174005760/dBdVix9h_200x200.jpg"},"createdAt":"Mon May 25 22:55:12 +0000 2026","engagement":{"replies":14,"retweets":21,"likes":459,"views":228976},"article":{"title":"How to hit $10M ARR in a few months.","previewText":"Below is our playbook.\nThe frame comes from one premise.\nMarketing is trading.\nAnd the rest of what follows is what falls out of taking that seriously. Most of it disagrees with the standard playbook.","coverImageUrl":null,"content":"Below is our playbook.\n\nThe frame comes from one premise.\n\nMarketing is trading.\n\nAnd the rest of what follows is what falls out of taking that seriously. Most of it disagrees with the standard playbook. A preview:\n\n- Average ROI is a vanity stat.\n\n- Refusing to run performance marketing is just declining free money.\n\n- You probably want to hire from @mondaydotcom.\n\n- What works for @viktor__com.\n\n- The \"influencer guru\" you're trying to hire doesn't exist as a single human being; that job is two jobs.\n\n- And the right person to run your marketing book is, unironically, a Jane Street quant.\n\nI spent a tiny amount of my life in HFT. I was never a great quant – but I sat close enough to greatness to know what it looks like, and the thing about working next to traders who are genuinely great is that you stop confusing your intuitions with the truth. You learn to ask for the number. That habit turns out to transfer cleanly.\n\n## The isomorphism\n\nA marketing leader is a portfolio manager. That's not a metaphor I'm reaching for; it's the same problem with the labels swapped.\n\nYour strategy leads are your traders, and your marketing channels are their trading strategies. Just as a trader's book contains multiple strategies – momentum, stat-arb, volatility – your marketing book contains influencer, performance marketing, and referral as separate strategies. Each book has a realized return, and your job is the only job a PM ever has: allocate capital toward the strategies with the highest risk-adjusted marginal return, and pull it from the ones that have decayed.\n\nNotice the word marginal. This is where most people get the problem wrong. The relevant quantity is never the average ROI of a channel. It's the return on the next dollar. Average ROI is a vanity stat; marginal ROI is the thing you actually trade against, and the two diverge the moment a channel starts to fill up.\n\n## Capacity is the whole game\n\nEvery strategy has a capacity constraint. As you push size into a channel, CPA rises – you exhaust the cheap inventory, you saturate the audience, your marginal customer gets more expensive than your average one. This is not a marketing pathology. It is the identical phenomenon to market impact in trading: the more size you push, the worse your fills. You don't get to opt out of it. You just manage the slippage.\n\nThe corollary is the one nobody wants to internalize: the highest-ROI strategies live in the long tail and they do not scale. A strategy returning 10x is, almost by definition, capacity-constrained – if it scaled, the return would already have been arbitraged down to the market clearing rate.\n\nThe single Substack sponsorship that converts at 8x. The one creator in a niche vertical whose audience is exactly your ICP. The community thread where your founder's reply gets 200 demo requests overnight.\n\nThese are real. They are beautiful. And they top out at numbers that won't move the needle for a Series C-stage startup.\n\nThis is exactly why a three-person HFT shop running a niche, low-capacity strategy can post Sharpe numbers that make a multi-billion-dollar fund weep, while the big fund grinds for an extra 10% of edge it has to fight twelve other desks for. Capacity and return are inversely related. The skill is not finding the one strategy that wins. It's running a portfolio of small, decaying, beautiful edges and rotating capital through them faster than they die.\n\n## The product is your starting basis\n\nNot every book starts from the same place, and pretending otherwise is how you misprice your own performance.\n\nA product like @mondaydotcom has a structurally harder distribution problem than a product like Zoom. Zoom has endogenous virality – every meeting invite is a free impression on a non-user; the product is its own distribution surface. That's a positive carry built into the product itself. Monday doesn't get that for free; it has to manufacture distribution the expensive way. Same operator skill, different baseline. If you don't adjust your scorecard for the basis you were handed, you'll fire good marketers and promote lucky ones.\n\n## In defense of performance marketing\n\nPeople love to say performance marketing is dead, or beneath them, or commoditized. Here's the trade: if your payback period is five months and you are not running performance marketing at size, you are leaving a known, positive-EV, fast-recovering position on the table.\n\nThat's not taste. That's just declining free money. That's being lazy.\n\nThere's a name for a desk that passes on a five-month-payback trade it has already underwritten, and it isn't \"brand-led\" or \"product-led\".\n\n## What's the marketing analog of alpha?\n\nIn trading, alpha is the excess return your skill produces after stripping out the market's contribution. Your edge compounds from being better informed and better tooled – superior data, lower latency, cleaner infra. Beta is the rest: what you got from being exposed to the market.\n\nThe marketing version maps cleanly. Beta is everything you get without earning it: category demand, endogenous virality baked into the product (Calendly's growth team is long beta whether they ship anything or not), inherited brand equity. Alpha is what your team produces independent of those tailwinds, from the same sources as in trading – proprietary information, better tooling, faster experimentation, and execution speed: rotating capital out of decayed strategies before competitors notice they've decayed.\n\nA team that improves blended CAC 30% during a category boom mostly got long beta. A team that holds CAC flat in a saturated category mostly produced alpha. Same observable number, opposite signals.\n\nThere's a corollary on the hiring side. Marketing resumes are mostly betas in disguise. The director of growth at @Zoom with a great-looking blended CAC (ideally during COVID) is, on the median, a beta carrier – every meeting invite is a free impression on a non-user, and the product is doing real distribution work. The senior marketer at Monday posting comparable numbers had to manufacture every dollar of it against the wind.\n\nRead marketing CVs the way you'd read a hedge fund's track record: against the basis. The unintuitive consequence is that you usually want the @mondaydotcom marketer over the Zoom one – even, especially, when the headline numbers say the opposite. None of which is a knock on Zoom's marketers; many are excellent. The product just carries a lot of beta, and you're trying to back out the team's contribution from the headline number.\n\n## How we've built the engines for Viktor\n\nBefore @viktor__com, we were trying to grow @jace_ai. Margins on jace were absolutely tiny, so there was no room to spend on marketing – we were optimizing for the last penny. But the constraint forced us to build the infra with even more care. By the time we launched Viktor, we already had a small creative factory, a couple of ad accounts warmed up, AI influencer relationships, and partnerships in place. We just swapped the brand on top and pushed. LTV/CAC went from barely above 1 to north of 10.\n\nWe built alpha on jace. The creative engine, the partnerships, the experimental velocity – and we got lucky enough to deploy it against a product whose unit economics could finally pay for marketing. The numbers moved because the basis improved, not because we suddenly got smarter.\n\nHonest disclosure: we are nowhere near where we want to be. The benchmarks we're trading toward are @mondaydotcom, @canva, @NotionHQ, the Jane Streets of marketing. We'll be posting our progress here, including the parts that don't work.\n\nWhere the book stands today:\n\nWord of mouth and referrals are by a wide margin our highest-Sharpe strategy. Cheap, compounding, and stubbornly capacity-constrained in exactly the way the good ones always are.\n\n[The creator program](https://viktor.com/creators) deserves its own post, and it's going to get one. The numbers on it are, frankly, hard to believe, which usually means either there's real edge or we're mismeasuring – we think it's the former and we're checking the latter.\n\nPerformance marketing is a meaningful, well-behaved part of the portfolio. It does what it says on the tin.\n\nInfluencers – last week X got a live demonstration of the convexity here. Big payoff, but we under-hedged the narrative risk and didn't control the story as tightly as we should have. Brand suffered. Lessons learned. The upside is real; the variance is something we now know to manage rather than admire.\n\n## What it means for hiring\n\nThis is where the framing stops being cute and starts changing decisions. If marketing is a trading book, you staff it like one.\n\nTake influencers as a channel. The instinct is to hire a seasoned influencer-marketing strategist to \"own\" the channel. No. Running influencers is an ops job – sourcing, outreach, contracts, scheduling, tracking deliverables – so you hire an operator. That operator needs a creative strategist alongside them to write the briefs, because the brief is the product spec and ops people, typically, are not the best at it. Two complementary roles, neither of them the mythical \"influencer guru\". They are very distinct and it's very unlikely that you'll find a person who is good at both.\n\nAnd the capital allocation across all of it – how much goes to which channel, when to scale, when to cut – is not a marketing-generalist decision. It's a quant decision, driven by the people who can actually estimate marginal ROI under noise.\n\nMedia buying or buying impressions is trading: an auction, a clearing price, slippage as you add size, edge that decays. So do you want a \"media buyer,\" or do you want someone who'll run it with the rigor of a trader – sizing against uncertainty, measuring incrementality, killing positions that have decayed? Those are not the same hire, and the gap between them is enormous.\n\nWhich is the honest punchline: yes, we'd hire Jane Street quants to run these books. Not as a gimmick – because the skills transfer almost perfectly. The whole point of thinking in this frame is knowing exactly what kind of person you're missing.\n\nOnto the next one."},"adhxContext":{"savedByCount":1,"publicTags":[],"previewUrl":"https://adhx.com/frydwia/status/2059045647634858329"}}