Top all-time · #2207
Brian Balfour
Personal blog · brianbalfour.com/essaysbusinessstartups
Brian Balfour's personal blog at brianbalfour.com covers business and startups. Since 2011, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Brian Balfour's essays on customer acquisition, growth channels and product-channel and market-model-channel-product fit frameworks for startup growth. Commenters call them insightful and must-reads.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called great, super awesome, highly recommended, gold, must-read and very insightful; the customer-acquisition essay is singled out.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Comprehensive content about how to authentically grow your product and company.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-08-14
- /essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-11-03
- Building a Growth Framework Towards a $100M Product (2017)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-25
- 5 Steps To Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channel3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-05-21
- /essays/customer-acquisition3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-08-14
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-26
- Hypotheses That Doubled Patreon’s Activation Success2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-22
- How To Become A Customer Acquisition Expert2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-09
What Hacker News says?
It's hard to reason from his post, but it seems like he's spending money on branded search terms. E.g. queries that include his website in its name. The effectiveness of branded search terms is absolutely worth discussing, and it's pretty easy to run a small scale test on if it works by comparing organic and paid traffic after the fact. But the issue is that this article doesn't differentiate between branded and non…
Comment linking /essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth
on “I stopped advertising and nothing happened”Submitted How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks as a story · 101 points
HN discussionReforge | Software Engineers, Product, Design | REMOTE US | Full Time Reforge is reinventing professional education. Our mission is to help people level-up in their careers, and meet like-minded people. read about our founder here: https://brianbalfour.com/ We're a team of about 50 and we raised a Series A from a16z earlier this year. By end of year we'll likely be between 80-100. We were profitable in the Millions…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)”Submitted Achieving The Network Effect: Solving The Chicken Or The Egg as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI've spent a ton of time as a developer trying to make money from various side projects and businesses. So most of my top "wish I'd discovered this earlier" list revolves around tech+business stuff: * Strategy #1: Charge more. patio11 has been shouting this from the rooftops for years, but it didn't sink in until after I started Indie Hackers[0]. If you charge something like $300/customer instead of $5/customer, you…
Comment linking /four-fits-growth-framework
on “Ask HN: What things do you wish you discovered earlier?”Submitted How We Got Through The "Trough Of Sorrow" as a story · 22 points
HN discussionThis article is pretty great, not written by me: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/customer-acquisition
Comment linking /essays/customer-acquisition
on “People start hating their jobs at 35”Submitted How New User Acquisition Channels Drive Change as a story · 13 points
HN discussionWhy is everyone so obsessed with ideas? Out of everything needed to succeed with a startup (idea, audience, acquisition channels, competition), the "startup idea" is the thing you can ALWAYS change. It's the thing you have the most control over. That's not the case, however, with acquisition channels (a topic I write extensively about [1]), or your audience (they come with pre-defined beliefs/behaviors that are hard…
Comment linking /essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth
on “Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]”Submitted Interesting On-Boarding Hypotheses from Patreon as a story · 11 points
HN discussionHigh level: Go where your customers already are and become a part of their community. Be a long-term person in a long term business. If they don't have a place, make it. If you have that, you're on your way to Product-Channel Fit [1]. Low level: I've also sent pointless emails and made useless phone calls and most people default to doing nothing when you contact them. So: If you think phone/email are where your peop…
Comment linking /essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth
on “Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users?”Submitted 5 Steps To Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channel as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis new post by Brian Balfour is related and super awesome http://brianbalfour.com/post/63581380690/customer-acquisitio...
Comment linking /post/63581380690/customer-acquisition
on “How YesGraph Got Its First 1000 Users”Submitted From 0 to 2 Million DAU’s: The Guide To Growing Your Startup via Partnerships as a story · 9 points
HN discussionBrian Balfour wrote about this a few years ago and I find that framing quite useful too (having led both innovation orgs within large mature companies as well as startups). Highly recommend a read. He talks about market - model - channel - product fit. In that order. https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enou...
Comment linking /essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enough
on “Channel/offer fit instead of product/market fit”Submitted Don’t Publish on Medium as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI was in similar state a few of years back. Read these, and used them to a good extent. Lean analytics. (must read) Product-Led growth. (must read) 22 Laws of marketing (must) One million followers If you like scientific approach: Influence by Robert Cialdini Contagious (Jonah Berger) This resource is also gold: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/customer-acquisition I am also documenting my learnings in a book [1]. [1…
Comment linking /essays/customer-acquisition
on “Ask HN: Suggest good books on bootstrapping a startup”Submitted How To Become A Customer Acquisition Expert as a story · 8 points
HN discussionRead books. See what works for you. The firs thing is to decide acquisition method. Inbound or outbound? Inbound is great if you are well known inthe space. Else it's slow. If you don't have a large network reach out to people. Find the right channels that would work for you. Read https://brianbalfour.com/ he has a page for learning to be customer acquisition expert. Lots of good recommendations. Most companies surv…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How to Sell Software?”Submitted The One Process Every Startup Should Have as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAlso found this last night, not exactly sales, but helpful none the less https://brianbalfour.com/essays/hubspot-growth-framework-100...
Comment linking /essays/hubspot-growth-framework-100m
on “Ask HN: What are some good books/resources about sales?”Submitted How To Know When To Go From Traction To Growth as a story · 6 points
HN discussionEveryone talks about product-market fit, but not many people talk about product-channel fit [1]. I've been doing plenty of research on acquisition channels [2] and (besides product-market fit) they're the most important thing that will make or break your product. The reason is pretty simple: If you think about a) Your product b) Your market c) Your acquisition channels, the most flexible thing is a). You can shape y…
Comment linking /essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth
on “How not to SaaS – lessons from 2 years of building 3k MRR SaaS”Submitted Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA framework that has worked for me is this framework by Brian Balfour: 1. Marketing-Product fit 2. Product-Channel fit 3. Channel-model fit 4. Model-Market fit Reference: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/market-product-fit https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-grow...
Comment linking /essays/product-channel-fit-for-growth
on “Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing?”Submitted Model Market Fit as a story · 3 points
HN discussioncorrect link is https://brianbalfour.com/essays/patreon-onboarding-growth
Comment linking /essays/patreon-onboarding-growth
on “Interesting On-Boarding Hypotheses from Patreon”Submitted From 0 to 2 Million DAU's: The Guide To Growing Your Startup via Partnerships as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI find Paul Graham's essays & Brian Balfour's essays very insightful. PG --> http://paulgraham.com/articles.html BB --> https://brianbalfour.com/essays/ I also follow YCombinator's podcast & Startup School Videos to glean what anecdotes I can find on getting users & finding product-market fit. [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg ]
Comment linking /essays/
on “Ask HN: What are the best blogs to read for growing a startup/company?”Submitted Product Market Fit is not only about a great product as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
