Why Trust Comes Before Paid Growth

Most companies build their growth strategy around paid acquisition first and trust later. Proton's Head of Digital Marketing, Mike Stakurski, says that's backwards. In this episode with our host Austin Willman, he explains why organic community trust has to come first — and why paid spend only works as a multiplier once that foundation exists. He also gets into how Proton thinks about LLM visibility, why some of the highest-ranking AI citations are coming from Reddit and YouTube instead of paid placements, and why he believes ROAS and LTV matter more than any short-term spike in traffic. 🎧 Full episode is here 🔗 FOLLOW US Website: https://www.digitalwebsolutions.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/digiwebsol Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dws_global LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-web-solutions./