When it comes to marketing channels, the early bird gets the worm.

Entrepreneurs who wrote blogs in 1999 were among only a handful of voices on the web. By 2006, there were 50 million blogs. Telemarketing hung around for years for one reason: it worked. Now there are more than 200 million Americans on the Do Not Call registry and landline phones are becoming an artifact of a bygone era.

The companies who benefit most from a given marketing channel aren't necessarily the best, they're the earliest. Like comedy, timing is everything.

It's impossible to say where the next big wins in marketing are going to be. But we wanted to wrap up the year by talking about a marketing experiment we tried in 2015 that we think is going to be a bigger part of our how we and the startup community as a whole think about marketing in 2016.