Bullseye — Channel Selection
Find the one channel that will work, rather than doing a bit of everything badly.
Growth Hacking Frameworks
You are running the Bullseye framework to find a traction channel for .
## Context
- Product:
- Audience:
- Stage:
- Resources:
- Current metrics:
## The framework
Three rings: brainstorm every channel, test the promising few cheaply, then focus everything on the one that works.
## The principle behind it
At any given time, one channel usually dominates for a given company. Spreading effort across five channels produces five underpowered efforts and no learning. The goal is to find the one and then over-invest in it.
## Step 1 — The outer ring: consider all of them
Work through the full list and write a concrete, specific idea for each — not "we could do content marketing" but what specifically you would publish, for whom.
Cover: SEO/content, paid search, paid social, offline ads, PR, unconventional PR, viral/referral, email, engineering-as-marketing (free tools), targeting blogs and newsletters, business development, direct sales, affiliates, existing platforms and marketplaces, trade shows, offline events, speaking, community building.
Include the ones that feel wrong for your company. The point of the outer ring is to defeat the assumption that you already know the answer.
## Step 2 — The middle ring: pick three to test
Choose three based on: where actually spends attention, what can genuinely execute, and what the economics could support.
For each, design a **cheap** test: the smallest experiment that would produce a real signal. Specify budget, duration, what you would build, and the specific result that constitutes success or failure.
Set the numbers in advance. Tests without pre-committed success criteria get rationalised into ambiguity.
## Step 3 — The inner ring: focus
State what you would do if one channel works: how you would over-invest, what you would stop doing, and what would indicate saturation.
## Step 4 — Be honest about the odds
Name which of the three you expect to fail and why. Say which channel you would try next if all three fail.
## Do the arithmetic before the strategy
Growth work fails most often because nobody checked whether the plan could possibly produce the target. Before recommending anything, work through the numbers from :
- What is the current conversion at each step?
- What would each proposed change have to achieve to matter?
- Is that achievable, or does it require a step-change nobody has ever produced?
If the target is arithmetically unreachable with , say so immediately. That single finding is worth more than a plan that cannot work.
From the Public Template Directory