From the time I started up, I have met many folks and they can typically be classified into two schools of thoughts regarding customer acquisition. The first set of people believe religiously that you create remarkable product & content, and that will get you the distribution you need. They also believe that continuous experiments and growth hacks are the only fuel required to push your remarkable product & content. (Note: Remarkable customer service is part of a remarkable product). These people are usually the darlings of the media and certain VC firms, which makes sense as being active on media and social networks are part of their growth strategy.
The second set of folks think that building free channels is a waste of time (except for direct traffic). Their reasoning is that free channels (including SEO) don’t scale beyond a point. So you will be stuck at a point where you might not be able to grow further. Even viral channels might give you a peak and then start dropping. So this second set of folks’ goal is to find a scalable paid channel where you can get back the money that you invested through the profit you make through that channel, aka operational break-even. Unlike free channels, this will allow you to scale faster by investing more in that channel.
Direct Traffic is a separate category by itself and should not be clubbed with other free channels. Sometimes, when most of the people talk about a remarkable content/product, they club direct traffic complicating the discussion. Even those who purely follow the paid channel strategy cannot survive without direct traffic, which in turn is driven by a remarkable product. So assuming direct traffic is a must (and so, in turn, remarkable product in a must), the discussion should be between other free channels and paid channels.
I think we need a combination of paid channels with scalable free channels. By scalable free channels, I mean channels such as Facebook Pages and Newsletters which can be scaled easily.