Pick one channel and actually commit
Being a bit active everywhere keeps you invisible, so test a few channels cheaply and go all-in on the winner.
Most founders do marketing like a buffet: a little SEO, a few posts, some cold email, a half-finished Product Hunt page. Then they wonder why nothing moves. In their book Traction, Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares count 19 channels you can use to get customers, and offer the Bullseye framework for choosing between them.
In a 2014 guest essay, Mares lays it out: brainstorm ideas for every channel, rank them, and pick the three most promising as your inner circle. Run small, cheap tests in each; a few hundred dollars can give you a rough read. Then focus on the one that works, because at any stage one channel tends to dominate. Mint did this with blogs, sponsoring mid-level finance bloggers and guest posting to win its first 40,000 users, and reached 1 million users within six months of launch.
Watch your biases while ranking. Everyone approaches channels with them, and the boring one you’d never try is sometimes the winner. Test three, then give the winner your full attention for the next month.
The example
- Instead of
- “Q3 plan: post on X, do SEO, run ads, try TikTok, send cold emails, launch on Product Hunt.”
- Try
- “Q3 plan: two-week tests of cold email, SEO and Reddit. Whichever wins gets all of August and September.”
Before you flush
Write down every channel you could use, circle the three most promising, and plan a cheap one-week test for each.