Decay Force #3: You Run Out of Early Adopters

The third driver is your own scale. The first people a channel reaches are early adopters: curious, tolerant, quick to try new products. As you spend more and dig deeper into the audience, you reach mainstream users who are more skeptical and respond worse to everything.

This means early channel metrics are systematically too optimistic. The CAC and conversion rates from your first campaigns describe your best possible audience, not your average one. Chen sketches the damage: a 30% rise in acquisition cost paired with a 30% fall in customer lifetime value can double your time to profitability. Models built on month-one numbers quietly break.

So saturation isn't only about a channel getting expensive. It's the audience within the channel getting worse as you go, even if you change nothing.