Sample frameDay 260·Growth · Acquire

Morning. You're running the channel you already know. That's a habit, not a decision.

Growth.

The Bullseye Framework

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

List every way a stranger could currently discover your business, then list the ways you've never tried — and if the second list is far longer than the first, and nothing on it was ever ruled out with evidence rather than instinct, how much of your growth is resting on a channel you inherited rather than chose?

The idea

Gabriel Weinberg founded DuckDuckGo in 2008 and has spent the years since growing a search engine in the shadow of the largest distribution machine ever assembled. With Justin Mares he interviewed more than forty founders about how they actually reached their first customers, and published Traction in 2014; Portfolio reissued it the following year. The book's most valuable contribution isn't advice, it's a list. Weinberg and Mares name nineteen traction channels — viral marketing, PR, unconventional PR, search ads, social and display ads, offline ads, SEO, content marketing, email, engineering as marketing, targeting blogs, business development, sales, affiliate programmes, existing platforms, trade shows, offline events, speaking engagements, community building. Nineteen. Most companies have seriously considered three. Their method, Bullseye, is three rings: the outer ring forces a plausible idea for every one of the nineteen, the middle ring holds the three or four worth a cheap test, and the inner ring holds the single channel that actually moved, which then takes nearly all your effort. They also argue for splitting your time roughly half product, half traction, from the first day rather than after launch. Most operators never work the outer ring at all. Channels get picked by familiarity — you run what you ran before, or what your last employer ran — and familiarity is not evidence. One channel is usually doing most of the work; the only question is whether you found it or settled for it.

The framework

01
Nineteen channels exist. You have opinions about four.
The outer ring is deliberately dumb work: take the full list of nineteen and write one plausible idea against each, including the ones you're certain are wrong. Speaking engagements for a software company. Trade shows for a consultancy. Engineering as marketing for a services firm — a free tool that solves one narrow problem for exactly your buyer, given away to be found. It takes twenty minutes if you hold each idea to a line, and its whole purpose is to interrupt the shortlist you walked in with, because a channel you have never considered cannot be one you rejected on evidence.
02
Three candidates — and the one question each test asks.
The middle ring holds the three or four worth spending on, and each needs its test designed before it starts — a budget, a deadline, a deciding number, and the craft of designing one is eight mornings away. What matters this morning is the question a middle-ring test asks, because most people ask the wrong one. It is not whether the channel can work; every channel works for somebody. It is whether this channel reaches your buyer at a cost you could survive at volume. Run the three in parallel where the money allows, because sequential testing takes a year and the answer usually arrives inside a month.
03
The inner ring — one channel, almost all of the effort.
When a test wins, the instruction is uncomfortable: stop the others and pour everything into the winner until you've wrung it dry. Most teams do the opposite, keeping four half-run channels alive because each is showing a little something. Four channels at a quarter of the attention each will lose to one channel run properly, every time, because channels reward depth — the tenth week of optimising a paid account or a content engine is worth far more than the first week of a new one.
04
Re-run the rings at each new size.
Weinberg and Mares describe distinct phases — winning the first customers, scaling what works, then scaling into something profitable — and the channel that suits one phase rarely suits the next. Hand-to-hand selling gets a great many businesses their first fifty customers and almost none of them their next five thousand. So put the exercise on a clock: once a year, or whenever the working channel's economics visibly move, walk the nineteen again with the business you now have rather than the one you had when you last did it.

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