In 2018, I was running growth for Gojek's regional expansion into Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Same app. Same product. Same budget allocation model.
Completely different results.
The instinct — what performance marketing trains you to do — was to optimize the channels. More search here, more social there, tweak the creative for local culture. We did all of that. It wasn't the problem.
The real problem was that we had three different distribution theories competing for one playbook.
In Indonesia, Gojek spread on word-of-mouth and a genuine infrastructure gap. The alternative was painful enough that product love did the acquisition work. Distribution followed product naturally.
In Singapore, that gap didn't exist. Grab owned the mental model. Distribution had to come first — you couldn't wait for organic adoption. No amount of channel optimization fixes a weak theory of why someone switches.
In Vietnam, the conversion bottleneck wasn't acquisition. It was activation. Two-wheelers dominated, digital payment trust was low, and first-transaction friction killed everything upstream.
Three markets. Three jobs to be done. One distribution playbook.
Eventually we untangled it. But the lesson stuck: distribution isn't a channel plan. It's a theory of why someone adopts your product in a specific context. Get that wrong and no amount of CAC optimization saves you.
Build the theory before you build the funnel.