Tactic 2/90: Bullseye Your Marketing

You don't know what's going to work. I don't know what's going to work. As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it:

[You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing — everything but the kitchen sink.

That is a really bad idea. It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.

The outer ring is what's possible.

The middle ring is what you're considering.

The inner ring is what you're doubling down on.

For each traction channel in your middle ring, model a cheap traction test you can run to determine if the idea really is good or not. These tests should be designed to roughly answer the following three questions:

1. How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel?
2. How many customers are available through this channel?
3. Are the customers that you are getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?

Once you've gone through the thought exercise for your top 9 ideas, try the top 3 traction tests for 2 - 4 weeks at your own startup. If none of them show signs of improvement, move on to your next 3 and repeat until you've exhausted the top 9 or have a channel that's showing promise. At this point, you should know what's worth re-testing and doubling down on.

Once you get one channel up and running, depending on its saturation point, you may want to plan which you'll move to next. If you're not careful, the saturation point will hit you like a brick wall and you'll run out of leads before you know it. Good luck and happy experimenting!