Bullseye is designed to help you find the best traction channel strategy to focus on as quickly as possible. Many founders unfortunately fail at applying Bullseye by ignoring promising traction channels due to natural biases. This is an
expensive proposition as it wastes resources by sending you down the wrong path.
To refresh your memory, here are the nineteen channels:
1. Targeting Blogs 2. Publicity
3. Unconventional PR
4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 5. Social and Display Ads
6. Offline Ads 7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 8. Content Marketing
9. Email Marketing 10. Viral Marketing 11. Engineering as Marketing 12. Business Development (BD) 13. Sales
14. Affiliate Programs 15. Existing Platforms 16. Trade Shows 17. Offline Events 18. Speaking Engagements 19. Community Building
We’re sure that some of these channels are unfamiliar to you. Why spend time and money on a channel you know little about, or that you think is
irrelevant to your business?
Traction channel bias may be preventing you from getting traction. You can get a competitive advantage by acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t.
A major function of this book is simply helping you overcome your biases against particular traction channels by educating you about them. There are three reasons why founders ignore potentially profitable traction channels:
1. Out of sight, out of mind. Startups generally don’t think of things like speaking engagements because they are usually out of their field of vision.
2. Some founders refuse to seriously consider channels they view negatively, like sales or affiliate marketing. Just because you hate talking on the phone doesn’t mean your customers do.
3. Bias against schlep—things that seem annoying and time- consuming. Channels like business development and trade shows often fall into this category.
Be honest with yourself: which traction channels are you currently biased for or against? You can overcome these traction channel biases and increase your chances of success by taking each channel seriously when using Bullseye. Good mentors can also help you here by helping you brainstorm and rank your channel ideas. Jason Cohen, whom we interviewed for offline ads, makes this point well:
I’ll bet you a lot of your competition will refuse to even try these channels. And if that’s true, that’s even more reason to go try those channels! It can almost be a competitive advantage (at least a temporary one) if you can acquire customers in channels that others cannot, or refuse to try. That’s more interesting than duking it out with AdWords competitors in positions one to three.
Traction is a tricky thing. Initial traction is unpredictable and can happen in many different ways—nineteen by our count. Because of this unpredictability, it makes sense to consider several channels in the pursuit of traction. In fact, every one of the channels listed above has been the channel for both enterprise and consumer startups to get initial traction.
At the same time, no one individual is an expert on all channels. However, certain people—namely startup founders who focus on them—end up becoming experts on particular channels. We set out to collect and synthesize all this
knowledge from founders and other experts with deep experience in each traction channel.
The startup experts we interviewed have founded companies that have made hundreds of millions of dollars, received billion-dollar valuations, and built some of the biggest companies. With this book, we’re giving you what worked for these founders and arming you with the frameworks, strategies, and tactics to help you get similar traction.
We’ve already covered a system to figure out which channel to focus on—
Bullseye—and how to go about doing so—Critical Path. The rest of the book helps you approach getting traction through each channel.
To your startup’s success!
TARGETS
Lay out your milestones. Determine your traction goal and
define your Critical Path against that goal, working backward and enumerating the absolutely necessary milestones you need to achieve to get there.
Stay on the Critical Path. Assess every activity you do against
your Critical Path and consistently reassess it. Building such assessment into your management processes is a good idea.
Quantify traction subgoals and put them on a calendar so you can properly monitor your progress over time.
Actively work to overcome your traction channel biases.
Being on the cutting edge of the right traction channel can make a huge difference in success. Which traction channels do you know most about? Which traction channels do you know least about? Mentors can help here.
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