When is it too early to spend on paid ads, and what should I do with that money instead?
If you can't yet convert warm, free traffic (friends, communities, organic posts) into paying customers, paid ads will just help you lose money faster. Ads amplify a working funnel, they don't create one. Until you've closed maybe your first 10 to 20 sales by hand and know why people buy, spend the money on talking to customers and fixing the offer, not on cold traffic.
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The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.
Alstromer ran growth at Airbnb and now works with hundreds of YC startups, and his core message answers the question directly: working on growth, including paid ads, before you have product-market fit and real retention is a mistake. He is specific about the metrics that actually signal you are ready, versus the vanity numbers that lie. It reframes paid spend as an amplifier for something already working, not a way to create demand.
When you have no budget, the worst move is to pour your limited time into a channel that was never going to work for your product. Traction gives you all nineteen ways a startup can reach customers and a simple way (the Bullseye framework) to bet on two or three worth testing first. Treat it as a menu and a method, not a verdict: your free channels will come from this list, you just have to find the ones that fit you.
