[acgourley]

If you make a lot of money buying users, you have very little incentive to talk about it. For one, you admit you don't have something magic and irreplaceable like a well known founder or well read blog. Secondly you may give a hint to competitors about which channels or keywords of paid acquisition are working for you.

[erichocean]

you admit you don't have something magic and irreplaceable

It seems like you're dismissing businesses that can do this as somehow not innovative, which is definitely not the case.

Many businesses are simply not designed as a business to benefit from growth through money (aka "buying users"). It's quite difficult to do so, even though we know it is possible, that others have done it, and that others are doing it right now.

Just because something is simple does not mean it is easy.

[dclusin]

I've heard secrecy thrown about quite a bit but I've always been a bit mystified as to why. The reason I'm confused is because it seems as though any of your well healed competitors would be able to study your product/marketing/etc and determine what you are spending time and effort on to acquire customers.

For instance one of the tactics mentioned in the blog is SEO/Adwords. From a competitors standpoint it seems like it would be pretty easy to reverse engineer where the company is devoting most of their money and effort into and thus their user acquisition strategy.

This of course assumes the competitors are technically sophisticated. Is this assumption really that much of an exception? Meaning, for those in business, are your competitors really that stupid?

[acgourley]

It's hard to comprehensively study what all competitors are doing. It's probably more than most startups can afford to allocate time for, anyway. You're right it's not impossible, but what advantage do you have making it any easier? Some blog writing about your great user-buying tactics? That's still not a great song to sing, when you could be saying, "our product is so great users just come to us"