For example, if we want to increase revenue, we need more users. To increase users, we need to spend more. However we do not have enough revenues to justify the spending. How did you make decision(s) in this situation?
1. I've increased prices for new customers by 30% to 50%. That can help right away if you are charging too little.
2. I've increased the discount on yearly and higher contracts to give us cash to fund the business upfront. IE, if you know your math you can make it easy. - You can approach existing clients for a contract increase too.
3. Adding to the checkout flow an upgrade recommendation at the final step, ie, for x dollars more a day you get this and this. We had a 30% uptake to our highest plan doing this.
The other way to go, is you can start thinking outside the box on marketing, but without knowing more that is hard. IE, how do you hit your customer segment for 1/100th the price you are now.
Revenue is a lagging metric that is a result of many things that you do in the business. You could increase revenue by increasing MRR by improving retention,reducing churn. You could increase expansion MRR by increasing value add for customers that enables you to translate that into upgrades/upsells.
Mostly, increasing users via acq only works when you have strong retention and thats a product problem, not a marketing problem.
I would suggest the Lean Analytics book to understand this in more detail and also this 6 part series from Social Capital.
https://medium.com/swlh/diligence-at-social-capital-part-1-a...
Its great that you left the sentence ended at "more" because generally the answer isnt in spending more money, its about discovering those channels that help you get your message and value prop to your target audience at very low cost. Ideally, the cost should really be "time" in that you should be able to spend more time on discoverig the channels than spending money(ads for eg) on such discovery.
My opinion veers towards revenue and hopefullly from existing customers rather than new users because its less expensive, you already have a relationship and a strong basis for this relationship is the value you are already adding for them.