A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups

I've spent the last 2 years researching what acquisition channels work consistently for founders [1] by reading over 500 founder interviews. I PURPOSELY avoid unicorn/"big corp" case studies/interviews (like the ones mentioned in the article) because of 2 main reasons:

1) They are almost useless to new founders. These companies were in their "early days" 6-10 years ago, back when MySpace was still a thing. Although you may learn some "timeless lessons" from them, you'll learn WAY MORE by reading from someone who's currently 2 steps ahead of you vs 100.

2) The curse of knowledge. In general, a photographer who spent 1 year learning how to take good pictures will prob. teach you in a more understandable/actionable way than someone who spent 10 years doing that. The reason is simple: They still remember how it was like to be in your position (beginning) vs. someone who's now focused on TOTALLY different things and forgot the beginner's mentality.

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

2) is also well-documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

While your reasoning might be true for your (1) case, in (2) ...

"a violinist who spent 1 year learning how to play" absolutely will not be able to teach you vs someone who spent 10 years. It takes about 2 years to sound not like a dying cat on the violin (you can ask anyone), and about 3-5 years to sound "ok". Vibrato itself take about 5-6 years to develop. Intonation (whether you are playing the right note) takes about 2 years to get a sense of, and 3-6 years to say "ok I know when I'm off", and about 15 years (ie more than your 10 year example) to say "ok I know how to improve".

At 10 years, a violin player is just getting over being a beginner into a moderate level.

Relying on a 1 year old violin player to teach you to play is begging for injuries (yes - playing the violin is an unnatural position and there are ways you can permanently injure yourself - imagine not being able to type ever again because your hands hurt) and possibly permanent burnout from the whole "learning to play music" enterprise.

No. In violin learning make sure you find someone who at least has gotten past the initial hurdles themselves to mentor you.

I can understand if you use some example like writing or journalism or photography to explain the "curse of knowledge" but violin playing isn't one of those things.

I play the violin on an amateur level, and am about 7 years into my journey. I am only now at a level where I am able to give some tips without having to indemnify myself from permanently disabling people who ask me to teach them.

Yeah, my point was to demonstrate the whole "curse of knowledge" principle, and something like "photography" would be more suitable. Edited the comment. This is why I love HN, you guys tear apart every single thing ;))

Thank you Darko for the research and I understand I should not complain about something I am getting for free, but I was rubbed the wrong way with the way you chose to distribute this—I was first asked for an email id, then sent an email with another link (I was expecting a PDF in the mail or at least a link to the content), this link then went to a page from where I could get another download link for the content, which turned out to be barely 1.5 pages.

I presume this was all done for analytics and for potentially harvesting email addresses to make a subscriber list.

Your privacy policy states—"We only ask for personal information when we truly need it to provide a service to you."

I am pretty sure there was no need to collect my email for linking me to a file that exists on your server for free distribution.

I am not trying to pick on you, but every time we have a post here on HN about FB or companies doing any sorts of analytics, we have lots of righteous indignation about how server-side analytics is enough and this and that. And yet, here you are, an individual (not a megacorp that needs to show quarterly growth) who effectively did something similar.

Anyway, after all this, I finally got a 2 page PDF with a small bulleted list with just the number of founders who vouched for every channel. The channel was just mentioned in a few words, so it wasn't always clear what the channel meant.

The PDF was so small I first thought you were only distributing the table of contents as a teaser.