Leadership
Why Granola launched 14 channels at once
Granola’s marketing team launched 14 channels at once. Here’s how they used freelancers, specialist swimlanes, and directional measurement to scale without losing focus.
Pranav Piyush
Co-founder, CEO
Why Granola launched 14 channels at once (and why the experts said they were idiots)
Experienced marketers — serious, credible ones — told Granola 's marketing leader that his plan would crash and burn.
“Some serious people have very strong opinions. It was basically: you can find everyone on Meta, so why would you bother doing anything else other than perfecting Meta for the first few months?”
They weren't wrong to be skeptical. Most early-stage teams that spray across 14 channels are running from the discipline of nailing one.
But Rob ignored the advice anyway. And the reason they could is the part nobody leads with. So I sat down with Rob Denton, who runs marketing at Granola, to figure out how a four-person team pulls this off without it falling apart. Here's what I took away.
You have to earn the right to do this
Before any of the channel stuff matters, be honest about whether you've earned the right to scale at all. Granola had real product-market fit before they spent a dollar on distribution. Word of mouth and product virality were already driving growth. Multi-channel was about amplifying that growth.
If your product is weak, channel diversification is just a more expensive way to find out. You don't paper over a bad product with more logos in your media plan. You amplify something worth amplifying, or you don't bother.
Swimlanes, not silos
The team is four people: a head of marketing, a PMM, a performance marketer, and a creator marketer. The belief: you can’t be excellent at both LinkedIn ads and Google ads. So each channel gets a specialist doing one very specific thing, purely focused on execution — not pulled into company noise.
“I just want the person who does LinkedIn ads, doesn’t want to do anything else, and is excellent at it. I don’t think you can be excellent at LinkedIn and Google ads both.”
So under each owner, every channel gets resourced with a specialist doing one very specific thing — a creative strategist, a video editor, a designer for statics — purely focused on execution, not pulled into company noise. The internal team gets deep at the start (what's the objective, what's the strategy) and again at the end (what are we actually putting in front of people). The middle gets handled by someone who lives in that channel all day.
Freelancers aren’t a budget hack — they’re how you validate
Here's the most interesting move from Rob. Freelancers aren't the cheap version of a real hire. They're the fastest way to find out whether a channel is real before you commit to it.
You probably don't have the specialism or the time to validate a new channel well in-house. And hiring for something unproven is the worst of both worlds — risky and slow. So every channel test at Granola starts with a freelancer. The ones that work get in-housed to scale.
“I feel like people are sleeping on freelancers. They’re generally more experienced, they can be a thought partner on strategy but also get super hands-on. And it’s super quick to stand them up — no hiring process.”
How do you know any of it is working?
This is where multi-channel strategies usually die. Measurement. Granola's answer is to not overcomplicate it. At this stage, directional incrementality is enough: if you killed this channel, how much would you lose?
Even a gut-level estimate is more actionable than waiting around for a lagging metric to tell you something you can't act on. For controllable channels, they isolate by geography. Launch Meta in California only. Launch TikTok in Australia only. Watch the output metric for an inflection over the next month, then go global. Rinse and repeat for every new channel.
It's not a clean holdout and they don't pretend it is — it's a directional read that's fast and good enough to make a decision.
For the harder ones — podcasts, newsletters — they run a time-based test: spike spend for a month, pull it back, and watch whether the output metric moves with it. Same logic. Directional, not surgical, but enough to learn from. (It helps that Granola has global appeal, which makes the geo splits actually work.)
The counterintuitive bit about brand
Lagging brand indicators like share of voice can feel like BS at this stage. You want to look at an interaction and understand its value now, not wait months for a soft signal.
“I really struggle with the lagging indicators for anything considered brand building. Even share of voice — I think it’s bullshit, not useful enough. I want to look at an interaction and understand the value of it.”
But branded search volume doesn't lie. A 50–60% increase in branded search is a real, observable signal that the multi-channel effort is building something — and you can see it in Google Trends and Search Console without a single vendor.
The practical proxy is simple: if branded search is going up and to the right, you're building demand. If it's flat, your marketing is likely not having the impact you think it is. That's the line between a brand and a media plan.
The punchline
The experts weren't wrong that focus matters. They were wrong about what to focus on. At an early stage, trying to measure everything perfectly is actually bad advice. You're not making hard trade-offs yet — you're learning what works. Build the swimlanes. Validate with freelancers and in-house what wins. Test incrementality even if it's only directional. And let the results speak.
The teams that wait until they can measure everything cleanly never launch anything worth measuring.
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