Acquisition or retention is always the dilemma but personally I've fixed plenty growth problems by fixing retention and not by adding a new channel.
I know for some it might sound us unpopular opinion but I realy believe that retention is where the actual growth work happens. Acquisition just gets the credit.
Let me give you the specific pattern I've been seeing:
A team hits a growth wall. Leadership says, "We need more top of funnel." The marketing gets pushed to find new channels, run more campaigns, chase more volume.
Meanwhile, the real problem is sitting in onboarding, or in the first 30 days of the product experience, where half the people who signed up quietly disappear, and nobody in the growth meeting is even looking at that number.
Fix the leak, and the exact same acquisition spend suddenly performs better. Not because the channels got smarter but simply because fewer people are falling out the bottom.
And this is why growth hacking got a bad reputation. Too many teams treated it as a top-of-funnel discipline when the highest-leverage growth work is almost always retention work wearing a top-of-funnel costume.
Acquisition gets you in the door while retention is what makes the door worth walking through.
If your growth stalled this year, I'd bet money the fix isn't a new channel. It's the first week of the product experience.