From the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo) and Justin Mares. The premise: there are nineteen distinct channels you can use to acquire customers, and the channel that will work for you is rarely the one you'd guess.

The 19 channels

Viral marketing · PR · Unconventional PR (stunts) · Search engine marketing (ads) · Social & display ads · Offline ads · SEO · Content marketing · Email marketing · Engineering as marketing (free tools) · Targeting blogs · Business development · Sales · Affiliate programs · Existing platforms (app stores, marketplaces) · Trade shows · Offline events · Speaking engagements · Community building.

The Bullseye method

  1. Brainstorm — for every one of the 19 channels, write down one plausible way you could use it. No dismissing yet.
  2. Rank into three rings: promising (worth a cheap test now), possible (maybe later), long-shot (probably not).
  3. Test — run cheap, fast experiments on your 2–3 promising channels at once. Each test should answer: roughly what does a customer cost here, and how many can this channel reach?
  4. Focus — once one channel is clearly working, pour your effort into it and ignore the rest until it stops scaling.

Why this matters for bootstrappers

You have limited time and money, so spreading thin across ten channels guarantees failure on all of them. The discipline is: test broadly but cheaply, then commit narrowly. At any moment one channel tends to dominate your growth — find it, then milk it.

Weinberg's rule of thumb: spend ~50% of your time on product and ~50% on traction, from the very beginning. Building is not the same as getting customers.