“When I was at Blinkist, one of the things that I was really proud of is establishing paid content as one of the main drivers — Outbrain and Taboola. That took me and my team I think nine months. It's a long time, it's like nine months of suffering and really bad performance and people saying are you sure you know what you're doing, but it eventually paid off.”

Budget any new paid channel for 9 months of bad numbers before judging it

Blinkist's now-flagship paid content channel took nine months of poor performance and internal skepticism before becoming a top driver. New channels need a multi-quarter runway and explicit air cover, not a 30-day kill switch. Protect long-horizon bets from short-term ROAS judgments.