Acquisition

Acquisition is the stage of the growth funnel focused on getting new users or customers to a product for the first time — the first letter of the AARRR framework.

Acquisition is the most measurable and most heavily invested-in stage of most growth funnels, largely because it's the easiest to attach a clean number to (CAC, installs, signups) compared to fuzzier downstream stages. That measurability bias is also its trap: teams often over-optimize acquisition volume and cost while under-investing in activation and retention, acquiring users a leaky funnel can't actually keep.

"Paid acquisition" and "organic acquisition" describe the same funnel stage reached through different means — the acquisition stage itself is channel-agnostic.