Author here - thanks for a thoughtful comment! :) The problem for them was mainly that the agency running their ad account counted "demo requests" as their top

Author here - thanks for a thoughtful comment! :) The problem for them was mainly that the agency running their ad account counted "demo requests" as their top metric and mistakingly counted all demo requests that came in as attributed to the marketing spend. So they reported on faulty numbers during the entire year. Hubspot showed that direct ads actually didn't work at all - there were only 2 identified leads (who downloaded some ebook) and the rest were anonymous users. Hubspot cookies them so if they would have gone on to get a demo, a trial or become customers, we'd know. They didn't insanely enough! We could also check IP ranges of companies visiting through ads, and they were not signed up as customers at any point. 100% agree that organic / product led growth is the way to go in the beginning. I should probably reword the article and say to not focus on "Paid" marketing - you still want to start thinking about organic etc. Thanks!