No growth before PMF

High churn, and an inability to generate word-of-mouth referrals, are strong signals that a business' product, or service, is not adequately meeting market needs, where price charged is less than value provided.

Spending significant resources to acquire customers pre-PMF is often a bad idea, and the same efforts would produce higher ROI if focused on iterating the value proposition until it meets user needs.

Obtaining customers at an early stage is best seen in the context of providing useful intelligence for product (or service) development vs for actual financial gain.

Whilst the statement that "distribution is the new moat" has a nice ring to it for social media, and sounds insightful, funnelling customers into a poor product is equivalent to pouring water into a bucket with a large hole. Or as water has mostly a $0 marginal cost for the consumer in the high-income world, perhaps a better analogy is of pouring expensive wine into the bucket!

A good product provides an in-built growth loop, creates real enterprise value, and offers the ultimate leverage. Intentional growth efforts, on top of a product with strong PMF, accelerate a pre-existing and established upwards trajectory, like adding gasoline to an already burning fire.