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Brand isn’t fluff. It’s performance with a longer payback window.

In early-stage companies, performance marketing is the hero - every dollar spent has to come back within the month. But at scale, the math flips. Brand becomes the cheapest way to acquire and retain customers over time.

Brand = CAC efficiency over time

When you invest in brand, you’re not buying impressions - you’re buying familiarity, trust, and mental availability. Those compound quietly until one day, when a prospect finally has the need you solve, you’re the only name they remember.

📉 The Quantifiable Impact of Brand

Every dollar of brand spend should do at least one of the following:

• ✅ Reduce future CAC

  Great brands create pre-qualified demand. When users have heard of you five times before clicking an ad, your CAC can drop 20-40%. (Think of how much cheaper it is to sell Nike shoes than a no-name brand.)

• ✅ Increase LTV & retention

  Customers who believe in your mission forgive mistakes, upgrade more, and stick around longer.

• ✅ Capture attention at low cost

  Strong brands unlock low-CPM surfaces: earned PR, podcast mentions, organic UGC, meme velocity. A $5 CPM podcast read that makes you memorable often beats an $80 paid social ad that’s forgotten in 2 seconds.

Brand is the multiplier on all your other channels. It makes everything work better — your click-throughs, conversion rates, even hiring and partnerships.

⚖️ Brand vs Performance Spend

Use this as a rough guideline rather than an absolute rule. This is what I’ve learned from others and my own experience.

You start with performance to discover demand, then you scale with brand to compound demand.

👨‍🌾 Reap & Sow

I’ve communicated our Superpower growth strategy to the team in the following way: We’re going to Reap & Sow.

Every initiative either:

• Sows seeds — building assets that compound over time (trust, attention, SEO, community, UGC).

• Reaps rewards — capturing the yield through high-intent, measurable performance.

Sowing: Awareness campaigns, PR, long-tail SEO, influencer seeding, owned media.

Reaping: Paid ads, referral loops, lifecycle marketing, direct-intent search.

The modern growth engine isn’t about choosing between brand and performance — it’s about stacking them. Brand sows the field; performance reaps the harvest.

Closing Thoughts

• Brand is measurable - just not on a 7-day attribution window.

• It compounds like equity: slow at first, exponential later.

• In a trust-scarce world, it’s your only defensible advantage.

Brand doesn’t replace performance. It’s what keeps performance from decaying.

Until next time,

Ajay

🧠 Ajay’s Resource Bank

A few tools and collections I’ve built (or obsessively curated) over the years:

• 100+ Mental Models
  Mental shortcuts and thinking tools I’ve refined over the past decade. These have evolved as I’ve gained experience — pruned, updated, and battle-tested.

• 100+ Questions
  If you want better answers, ask better questions. These are the ones I keep returning to — for strategy, reflection, and unlocking stuck conversations.

• Startup OS
  A lightweight operating system I built for running startups. I’m currently adapting it for growth teams as I scale Superpower — thinking about publishing it soon.

• Remote Games & Activities
  Fun team-building exercises and games (many made in Canva) that actually work. Good for offsites, Zoom fatigue, or breaking the ice with distributed teams.

✅ Ajay’s “would recommend” List

These are tools and services I use personally and professionally — and recommend without hesitation:

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• Athyna – Offshore Hiring Done Right
  I personally have worked with assistants overseas and built offshore teams. Most people get this wrong by assuming you have to go the lowest cost for automated work. Try hiring high quality, strategic people for a fraction of the cost instead.

• Superpower – It starts with a 100+ lab tests
  I joined Superpower as Head of Growth, but I originally came on to fix my health. In return, I got a full diagnostic panel, a tailored action plan, and ongoing support that finally gave me clarity after years of flying blind.