If you have a startup, what matters most is getting to the customers. You need to master acquisition channels and thus prove the real growth of your business. Many beginner entrepreneurs believe that a good product sells itself.
Unfortunately, this is not true. You need consistent growth. You need traction. You need a systematic approach, a method to keep growing and each time attracting more customers. Do not blindly repeat the techniques and tactics adopted by other companies.
Do not make ads or just create a blog because other companies are creating it. If you keep trying to grow without a clear strategy, you will end up broke, with no money and no users. Traction means you can acquire new customers in a predictable and scalable way.
Startups often spend most their time/resources developing their products; by the time they realize they need to get more customers and try to ramp up their sales/marketing efforts, they’ve run out of money.
As you develop your product, you should concurrently test your traction channels, spending 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction. That way, you can get market feedback to refine your product and start building a customer base, so you can grow quickly once your product is ready.
A startup is like a leaking bucket, and your role is to gradually plug the holes so the water (investments) you pour in won’t leak out.
You can’t predict which traction channels will work; the only way is to test them. Bullseye is a framework to help you identify the most optimal channel that your startup should focus on.
It consists of three steps - brainstorm what’s possible, then run cheap strategic tests to find the more promising channels, before finding the 1 most promising core channel and mastering it. After you’ve extracted the most from your current core channel, rerun the Bullseye to find the next best channel.
There are quite a lot of channels through which you can acquire customers. Some of them are mentioned in the table below.