&quot;It’s not hard to generate massive revenue’s with a really bad business model. One case study is Groupon and how, at one point, they were spending almost 80% of revenues on marketing.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve found the amount of marketing spend required to <i>sustain</i> revenue to be a contrarian indicator.<p>While &quot;if you build it they will come&quot; doesn&#x27;t work in a pure sense (in most cases), if you have a good product and business model it should &quot;take off&quot; on its own at some point after you&#x27;ve primed the pump. It should not require you to constantly ram it down the market&#x27;s throat to sustain revenue. If revenue has no &quot;buoyancy&quot; without marketing pushing on it, that&#x27;s an indicator of something that people maybe don&#x27;t really want&#x2F;need that much.<p>For example: if Apple ceased all of their marketing spend I would expect a small revenue dip and a dip in growth but not a huge one. Their revenues would not crash and burn. That&#x27;s because people like them and tell their friends and that would sustain some level of growth even without marketing spend.