For every 24 hours, Americans spend on average only 5.94 online, which means that companies only have those six hours every day to get the right messaging in front of the right audience and convert them into customers. With endless demand and a finite supply, human attention is arguably one of the most valuable resources in the world—companies are constantly competing for your attention and your wallet.

The race for your time and money has only gotten tighter thanks to the addition of the apps and channels we use to live, work, learn, and play like Google, Facebook, IG, TikTok and Netflix.

On social media, streaming and gaming sites reduce “marketable” hours to a small fraction of each day. But that’s where the challenge, and the opportunity, lies.

How you bring new consumers to your business is customer acquisition, also sometimes referred to as “user acquisition,” depending on the type of products or services you’re offering. Given the demand to command human attention, one of the top challenges for any startup is cost-effectively acquiring and retaining new customers.

 Regardless of your business or startup size, acquiring customers profitably is critical to running a business. It also provides traction for your startup to customers, partners, investors, influencers, and prospects. All future startup growth depends on two things: acquire customers fast and acquire customers sustainably.

Most startups generally work with contractors or marketing agencies in the early days to help with growth marketing. The general approach tests different paid and organic user acquisition channels to determine what works and doesn’t.

The secret to scaling customer growth in a startup is running as many A/B tests as possible. A/B testing, as it’s commonly referred to, involves testing a set of independent variables (offer, copy, pricing, etc.) to find statistically significant improvements toward reaching your business goals.

This approach would lead you to test, learn, and iterate as quickly as possible by finding small wins that end up compounding into massive growth. The A/B testing and hypothesis development must be scientifically based on best practices, observable evidence, and statistical significance.

Today, we can leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance and manage your user acquisition channels, radically accelerate the velocity of A/B testing all the key variables (like audiences, geographic markets, creatives), and process all your user data faster to uncover better insights and make smarter decisions on where to invest your user acquisition budget to get the best ROI.

These powerful marketing platforms have application programming interface (API) connections, making capturing and sharing data much easier to automate the critical levers for optimizing campaigns without being dependent on humans.

There is no better time to leverage these ideas, strategies, tools, and technologies to scale up your startup growth and stack the odds for success in your favour.