Attio Invests 40% in New Channels. Lovable is 95%. Here's Why Both Are Right.

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The CRM startup Attio puts 60% of its growth investment in proven channels and 40% in emerging and unproven channels. If that sounds aggressive, you should sit down before reading further.

The marketing team at Lovable says they invest 95% in unproven growth levers and only 5% on optimizing what already works.

Two different companies. Two different allocations. Both finding success and outpacing their peers.

I spent a lot of time over the past week on which approach was “right.”

It turns out that’s the wrong question. The right question is asking where each company is in its category and where the category is in its maturity.

At Recurrent, I’ve watched our own allocation shift dramatically as the EV market matured, and early entrants found their traction in different corners of it. What people know and think about electric cars is much different today than 5 years ago, and so is how we allocate our growth investments.

After studying the growth models at more than a dozen high-growth companies, including those with my fingerprints on them, here’s a framework you can use to treat your growth channels like an investment portfolio.

Venture-to-Bond Budget Model

When it comes to investing, 25- and 65-year-olds shouldn’t have the same portfolio mix. Financial advisors would tell you that a younger investor can absorb volatility and be more aggressive with growth stocks. The older investor needs predictable returns because there’s less time before retirement to recover from a bad quarter.

Growth channels work the same way.

An early-stage company in an emerging category can (and should) bet heavier on unproven channels because (1) there’s often no proven playbook to follow and (2) the potential upside outweighs the relative cost. No bets, no rewards.

Meanwhile, a publicly traded company can’t boom in Q1 and bust in Q2 because their marketing experiments didn’t pan out. They need channels that deliver predictable, repeatable pipeline.

But most growth teams don’t think about their channels this way. Instead of treating channels as a line item in a budget, we need to be thinking of it as an investment portfolio with a specific risk/return profile.

The Venture-to-Bond Budget Model uses three channel classifications that we’ll map to your company’s maturity stage (drawing from the Four Waters Framework) to help you find the right allocation for where you are now.

1. Blue Chips are proven channels with predictable returns. You know the CAC, you know the conversion rate, you can forecast with confidence. These are the bonds and index funds of an investor portfolio.

2. Growth Stocks are channels showing early promise but unproven scale. These will need to be nurtured to determine if they’ll graduate to Blue Chip status.

3. Venture Bets are totally unproven channels, new experiments, emerging platforms, unconventional plays. Most will fail. And we’re ok with that.

Now let’s build and manage your portfolio.

1. Diagnose Your Stage

Category maturity is the single biggest input to your allocation. It’s the equivalent of your age in a financial portfolio.

I covered category maturity stages in the Four Waters Framework, and those stages map directly to how aggressive your growth portfolio should be:

• Uncharted Waters is full of Venture Bets. You don’t have proven channels yet because the category barely exists. Lovable reports having to rediscover product-market fit every 3 months so that puts their 95/5 mix into context.

• First Voyage is when your early Venture Bets begin producing signal. Some are graduating to Growth Stocks and it’s getting easier to identify and cut losses faster. This is where Recurrent is today.

• Charted Course is when your early Growth Stocks are graduating into your first Blue Chips. This is where Attio sits today with 60% in Blue Chips, 20% in Growth Stocks and 20% in Venture Bets.

• Crowded Waters is when your portfolio is overwhelmingly Blue Chips with a focus on optimization. Venture Bets are smaller, more targeted, and designed to find an edge in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Test it: Plot your company on the Four Waters Framework. Then list every growth channel you’re investing in and classify it as a Blue Chip, Growth Stock, or Venture Bet.

Lesson: The channel mix that got you where you are today is almost certainly not the mix that gets you to the next stage. Understanding that is enough to put you ahead of most of your competitors.

Common misstep: The maturity stages don’t have perfect delineators so I’ve found that most teams don’t realize when they’ve advanced to the next stage. Attio’s 60/20/20 split isn’t permanent. Two years ago it looked different. Two years from now it will look different.

2. Land and Expand

Time and money are precious resources in the early days. It always makes sense to start with the most logical (often manual) growth levers to extract as much as possible before deliberately expanding.

Attio’s leadership team (Nicolas, Alexander and Alex) described how the company started by building in public on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Next, the inherited cohort of VC users from their previous product created a slow but valuable organic feeder that compounded without paid spend.

Only after that did they experiment with search marketing. They tried SEO and it didn’t work. They tried paid search to find pockets where the economics were right and, as we’ll see, got more aggressive over time.

Test it: Write down your current channels in the order you adopted them. Look for sequences that follow a logical and insightful progression, and where you deviated.

• What did you try too early that you could potentially revisit now? For Recurrent it was paid social.

• Which Venture Bets have failed to mature and need to be replaced?

• What would you need to see from one of your Growth Stocks to double down as a Blue Chip investment?

Lesson: Seeing your entire portfolio written out and categorized should surface 1-2 immediate opportunities. I’ve never done this exercise with a marketing leader and not found an actionable outcome.

Common misstep: “This didn’t work when we tried it” is an opportunity to revisit if the company or category have evolved.

3. Grade Your Positions

The hardest part of managing a growth portfolio is having the confidence to double down on a Growth Stock or abandon a Venture Bet, even when the team wants it to win.

It helps to set the criteria before you place the bet:

• Target metric and threshold: What specific number is needed to signal this is working?

• Time horizon: How long will you run the bet before making a graduation / abandon decision?

• Maximum investment: What’s the ceiling on dollars or hours before you require positive signal?

When Attio tested paid search, they were competing with incumbents whose marketing budgets were larger than Attio’s company valuation. Bidding on “best CRM” was unlikely to pencil.

But large competitors and budgets always have oversights and inefficiencies.

I’ve lived this at Recurrent. We operate in the automotive space, so we bump into some of the most recognizable brands in America — companies that run Super Bowl ads and sponsor the popular podcasts on your playlist.

We can’t compete in the same places. But we have been able to find opportunities in places that might not be important enough for them to care but have a material value to us.

One example is that Recurrent invests early and often in rising stars on YouTube. Instead of buying transactional air time from massive influencers, we found creators just getting started. To us, their success was inevitable. To them, Recurrent believed in them before anyone else and contributed to their success by growing with them. Their growth became our growth.

That’s the mindset startup teams need. We’re not trying to win the channel. We’re trying to find the sliver of the channel that the rest ignores.

Test it: Treat each channel like a pitch competition. If you had to pitch each channel to an investor, would they buy it as a Blue Chip investment? Look for the places that you have strong defensibility, repeatability, scalability. And where you don’t.

Lesson: Most startups can’t compete head to head with incumbents. But we don’t do this because we like fair fights.

Attio competes on “best CRM” now.

Building Your Portfolio

There’s no “right” allocation. That’s the whole point.

Lovable’s 95/5 split toward innovation works because they’re in an AI category that’s moving so fast that last quarter’s proven tactic is this quarter’s legacy approach. Attio’s 60/20/20 works because they’ve found channels that deliver while still needing room to discover what’s next.

• “What’s the right ratio?” ❌

• “Does my current ratio match where I actually am?” ✅

The answer changes. Lovable’s allocation will look different a year from now as their category matures. Attio’s already has.

If you’re in an emerging category and 80% of your budget goes to proven channels, you’re investing like a retiree.

If you’re scaling toward predictable revenue and 60% of your budget goes to experiments, you’re investing like a 20-something day trader.

Your growth portfolio should mature with your company. The teams who figure that out will spend less time wondering why last quarter’s playbook stopped working.