Traction: choosing your growth channel with the Bullseye

Who should use it, and when not to

Use it when a product works for early customers and you need a repeatable way to get more, when marketing is spread thin across many channels with no clear winner, or when a channel that worked has stopped growing.

It assumes people want the product. If they don't come back after trying it, more traffic won't help: see The Lean Product Playbook first.

The core ideas

Traction is half the work. The authors argue that founders spend most of their time on the product and too little on distribution, though both are needed.

The 19 channels. Targeting blogs, publicity, unconventional PR, search engine marketing, social and display ads, offline ads, search engine optimization, content marketing, email marketing, viral marketing, engineering as marketing (free tools that bring in customers), business development, sales, affiliate programs, existing platforms, trade shows, offline events, speaking engagements, and community building.

The Bullseye. Outer ring: what's possible. Middle ring: what's probable. Inner ring: what works. Ranking and testing replace habit and guesswork.

Cheap tests first. A first test should answer one question, is this channel promising?, for little money and in weeks, measured on cost per customer and volume.

A worked mini example

This is an illustration. A booking app for dog groomers in Australia has 60 customers, mostly from a groomers' Facebook group where the founder posts. Google Ads cost about 400 dollars per customer last year. The team has 3,000 dollars and 10 hours a week for six weeks, and wants 150 customers by June.

The outer ring includes ideas the team hadn't considered: a free calculator showing groomers what no-shows cost them (engineering as marketing), and a supplies wholesaler including a leaflet in orders (business development). The middle ring tests three: referrals from current customers, 100 phone calls to groomers, and the calculator. Each has a budget and a success number set before it starts.

How to run the Bullseye

1. Set the goal: customers needed by a date, and the most you can pay per customer.
2. Brainstorm one specific idea per channel, all 19.
3. Rank them by likely customers, cost per customer and time to learn.
4. Pick the top three for the middle ring.
5. Design cheap tests with a budget, a duration and success numbers.
6. Run them in parallel and compare the results side by side.
7. Focus on the winner, with a stop rule for when it stops growing.

The Bullseye channel plan skill runs these steps with your numbers and marks estimates until tests replace them.

Common mistakes

• Skipping the brainstorm. The overlooked channel is often the one that works.
• Testing one channel at a time.
• Expensive first tests.
• Staying in a channel after it saturates.

Where it comes from

Gabriel Weinberg founded the search engine DuckDuckGo; Justin Mares is an entrepreneur. For Traction they interviewed founders about how they got customers. Weinberg published an excerpt describing the Bullseye in 2015. Weinberg later co-wrote Super Thinking, a book on mental models.

This page is an independent summary in our own words. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors or their publishers. The book's title is used only to name it. More explainers are in the business books index.

Questions

What is the Bullseye framework?

A way to choose a growth channel in three rings: brainstorm one idea for every traction channel (outer ring), run cheap tests on the most promising few in parallel (middle ring), and focus on the one that works (inner ring).

What are the 19 traction channels?

Targeting blogs, publicity, unconventional PR, search engine marketing, social and display ads, offline ads, search engine optimization, content marketing, email marketing, viral marketing, engineering as marketing, business development, sales, affiliate programs, existing platforms, trade shows, offline events, speaking engagements, and community building.

Why test channels in parallel?

Because results side by side, with the same budget and time, show which channel is really promising. Testing one at a time is slow and makes channels hard to compare.