From the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (founder of DuckDuckGo) and Justin Mares. The premise: there are nineteen distinct channels you can use to acquire customers, and the one that works for you is rarely the one you would guess. Most startups fail not because the product is bad, but because they never found a channel that reliably brings customers.
The 19 channels
Viral marketing · PR · Unconventional PR (stunts) · Search engine marketing (ads) · Social and 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
Picture three concentric rings and work your way inward.
- Brainstorm. For every one of the 19 channels, write down one plausible way you could use it. No dismissing anything yet.
- Rank into three rings: promising (worth a cheap test now), possible (maybe later), and long-shot (probably not).
- Test. Run cheap, fast experiments on your two or three promising channels at once. Each test answers two questions: roughly what does a customer cost here, and how many customers can this channel reach?
- 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 mediocre results on all of them. The discipline is to test broadly but cheaply, then commit narrowly. At any given stage, one channel tends to dominate your growth. Find it, then work it until the returns flatten.
Weinberg's 50 Percent Rule: spend half your time on product and half on traction, from the very beginning. Building something is not the same as getting people to use it.