That second "magic" channel? Probably won't work as well as (or similar to) the first one.
Your first channel is your high school sweetheart
Every business remembers its first. That one channel where product/market fit feels effortless, like the world was conspiring to send you customers. It’s intoxicating. It’s dependable. It feels like forever.
For most companies, that high school sweetheart is either Google or Meta. For TeePublic, an ecommerce apparel marketplace, it was organic search. We had some structural advantages that we doubled down on early in the business:
Long tail unique content that no one else had (i.e. "funny Star Wars cat t-shirt") and that we could dominate the search results for.
Google crawling the catalog daily because TeePublic artists would upload new content on a daily basis, matching what was trending on Google search.
We obsessed over crawl budgets, tag hierarchies, and quality over quantity when it came to indexation logic.
It worked like magic (not really magic, it was deliberate). The long tail of the internet became our growth engine. Every trend, every meme, every cultural blip…if people searched for it, TeePublic had a shirt for it. And Google rewarded us with traffic, customers, and cash flow.
This SEO-first strategy had clear benefits, namely we got more mileage out of our content and were first to market with trending topics. We buttressed this with an aggressive email capture strategy and CRO strategy that was designed to quickly move traffic down the funnel and convert. We reduced steps and complexity in the checkout process to make it fast and easy. And we purposefully limited on-site choice in order to match the intent you showed on organic search (i.e. Google is our search filter).
That foundation scaled the business. Organic was our savior. And as we evolved, we added another strategic lever: Google Shopping. Google Shopping played to our strengths as it is, by its nature, visual and is a visual search engine for our highly visible product offering. It accelerated our growth in a way that traditional text-based organic/paid search could not. We were able to capitalized on our content and content strategy as Google began to prioritize shopping over organic search results. We maintained prime real estate in SERPs (this turned out to be a double-edged sword as Amazon and Etsy moved into our organic space, we competed with them in Google shopping in a way we couldn't in SEO).
Shopping gave us a more high fidelity lever than organic search because we controlled the bidding, budget, product feed, campaign structure. We figured out that shopping crawl (which comes first) influenced what was crawled and indexed for organic search.
Shopping was another lever, but it was organic search adjacent, meaning our acquisition engine was still based on capturing existing demand on Google. While it functioned differently than organic search, we were still tied to the Google ecosystem to acquire new customers. It worked. But shopping didn't save us. It bought us time.
Because the real system underneath was fragile:
We were addicted to first-purchase profitability.
We treated customers like one-night stands instead of long-term relationships.
Our brand equity was weak, so people told friends, "I got the t-shirt on Google" rather than "I got it on TeePublic."
Adding Shopping didn't solve our growth problem. Most companies plateau because their first channel takes them as far as it can. When that happens, the instinct is to find the "next channel" that will pick up the slack. But if the system underneath is broken, the second channel won't save you.
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Why what got you here won't get you there
The instinct when growth plateaus is to go hunting for the next channel, i.e. the college rebound after your high school sweetheart. "If Google carried us this far, maybe Meta will pick up the slack. Or TikTok. Or influencers. Or…"
Most teams approach a second channel like they approached their first. And this is where they get it wrong.
Your first channel is usually "natural." It fits your product, your users, your distribution almost by default. At TeePublic, it was organic search and shopping. We didn't force it. The long tail + daily uploads made SEO a perfect match. And shopping was the next channel because it acted so similarly to the first.
The second channel, by contrast, is manufactured. You have to design it. You have to resource it. You have to accept that it won't just slot neatly into the same playbook. Unlike organic, Meta Ads wasn't a perfect fit for TeePublic. We weren't built on demand generation. Our brand wasn't strong enough to stop someone mid-scroll and make them care. And our creative pipeline was paper-thin. We treated Meta like a monolith: same ads on Facebook and Instagram, no real differentiation in audience or placement.
The only thing we really used Meta for was remarketing. Take the traffic Google gave us and chase it around the internet until it bought a shirt. It kinda worked. But it was shallow leverage. It wasn't discovery, it wasn't brand, it wasn't scale. It was just mop-up duty for the traffic that mattered: Google's.
Here's the problem with manufacturing a second channel like Meta:
It's resource-intensive. Creative costs pile up, audiences fatigue, and you need people to manage it.
It doesn't compound if the foundation is weak. Retention issues? Brand equity issues? Meta amplifies rather than fix a poor offer.
It's rarely plug-and-play. You can't expect Meta to just "work" because Google did. Different intent, different dynamics, different economics.
That doesn't mean Meta is a bad channel. For the right product and the right team, it can be a monster growth driver. But for TeePublic, it was manufactured leverage. It didn't come with the "natural PMF" tailwinds of organic.
And that's the bigger point:
👉 Your first channel feels like it chose you. Your second channel is one you have to choose.
Which means you have to be deliberate about what role it plays, how you resource it, and how it compounds with the system you already have. So how do you approach a second channel without falling for the savior myth?
Fix the system before you add fuel.
If first-purchase profitability is your north star KPI and your retention curve is flat then a second channel only exacerbates the issue.
Define the role of the channel.
Not every channel should be an acquisition workhorse. Some are for brand building, some for engagement, some for margin capture. Be explicit: Is this channel meant to acquire, retain, amplify, or defend?
Don't expect symmetry.
Your second channel will not look like your first. Meta Ads is nothing like Organic Search and it works precisely because we let it play a different role, not because we tried to force it into the same mold.
Run it lean at first.
Treat new channels as experiments or "emergent." Start with a theory of the case: tight hypotheses, small budgets, and fast feedback.
Build compounding loops.
The real power of a second channel is when it plugs into your system. Organic → Shopping → Email remarketing was TeePublic's flywheel. Each piece amplified the others.
Until next week,
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