Replacement Level Marketing

Small teams have more reach than ever before, and can build huge businesses with very few resources. Among Us is a multi-platform game built by a team of 3, that reached 500 million monthly active users, and recently hired their 4 and 5th team members.

Some small teams are going to world class at marketing and growth. Others will just have a compelling product. Others will just get lucky. For the teams that where world class marketing isn’t part of the secret to success, tools that help a small team automate or scale marketing will be hugely valuable. Among Us doesn’t have to optimize every last possible dollar out of the platform yet. With a team that size, they don’t have to ever. Just putting a little effort on the basics, or replacement level marketing, will get a lot of return for these small businesses, allowing them to focus most of their time on their core value drivers.

In a world like this, tools that are easy and cheap to install, but can support more complexity as you grow will have powerful customer acquisition advantages: see Amplitude. Tools that can simplify parts of marketing and sales for a generalist will also be compelling: see copy.ai.

I think this is an area ripe for disruption (or aggregation of small businesses). Offering good enough tools that aren’t built for marketing specialists, but are built for part time generalists. Offering tools that start cheap, but can monetize the upside as the business grows and pivots from needing a “good enough” to needing a power tool. Most of the marketing enablement software out there is aimed at specialists. There’s a huge opportunity to use more of the emergent AI to serve the low end of the market, and ladder up to complexity over time.