I joined Convex in February to figure out how to Get That Money. Since then we've sponsored newsletters, paid creators to make videos shilling us, poured thousands into Google and Reddit ads, and hired an expensive AEO agency that tried to convince us to hook a slop cannon to our website. But when we looked at the data, nothing was working. Paid ads bought crap traffic with 2.5x the bounce rate, and ~$100k in sponsorships bought a trickle of very expensive visitors who didn't build anything (and cost us $100+ per click). Revenue was accelerating, but it appeared to be completely unrelated to our efforts. The thing that's actually working: the startup program. Startup cohorts grow their spend 30x over 24 months. Winning infra trust is brutal; the signals that earn it are expensive and hard to fake. So we're killing the experiments and tripling down on what's working.