Lean AI

Chapter 3. What Is Customer Acquisition 3.0?

The advent of new algorithms, faster processing, and massive, cloud-based data sets is making it possible for all the major digital media providers who sell advertising to experiment with artificial intelligence to help drive better performance for their advertisers. And while all areas of marketing are particularly ripe for transformation, this chapter will focus on the areas of new customer acquisition and revenue growth, because that is where most startups usually spend the most discretionary money. These areas—which collectively we will call Customer Acquisition 3.0—have the biggest impact on scaling growth in your business and the power to unlock future rounds of funding.

New Dimensions for Scale and Learning

In the world of Customer Acquisition 3.0, no longer will scale represent only the traditional value of achieving cost leadership and optimizing the provision of a stable offering. Instead, scale will create value in new ways across multiple dimensions: scale in the amount of relevant data companies can generate and access, scale in the quantity of learning that can be extracted from this data, scale to diminish the risks of experimentation, scale in the size and value of collaborative ecosystems, scale in the quantity of new ideas they can generate as a result of these factors, and scale in buffering the risks of unanticipated shocks.

Learning has always been important in business. As Bruce Henderson observed more than 50 ...