Fruitful channels may surprise

The most effective channel for a business to begin may not be the obvious one.

Although there are at least nineteen different channels a startup can discover customers through, a few often get priority because of the number of potential viewers or the ease of use. Online methods, in particular, are easy to get started (at least for the tech generations) and have billions of potential viewers. Even so, exploring all of the channel opportunities may reveal others that would yield more customers at this stage in your businesses growth.

To use my beads-in-a-bucket analogy again, selecting a channel to press into is like seeing nineteen buckets and not knowing which one has the most beads in it. You may assume that the online bucket has the most beads; after all, it’s a HUGE bucket!, but after your hole is drilled you may find out there’s just a few rolling around the bottom. If you open up a few select buckets you may find one pours out beads readily. That’s the one you want to drill for all it’s worth.

The emphasis Weinberg and Mares place on the growth curve of the startup is a valuable component when considering which channel to choose (Weinberg, pg. 14). Too easily one could select a channel based on its potential or because established companies have had success with that channel and lose sight of the need to gain many customers early, by whatever channel, in order to launch effectively. Even if that means selecting a channel that you suspect will have a lower total customer count, such as billboards or trade shows, these channels should not be overlooked. There’s a chance that the channel no one in your field is pursuing may be the best for your startup to gain momentum so that, when you have hit the saturation point you’ll be ready to enter the next channel with an established user base.

The correlation between lean startup methods for product development and similar methods for customer development makes Traction a clear and effective book for me. There’s a sense of experimentation with the acquisition of customers, and the sense that the product needn’t be perfect before you get customers using it fits well with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach.

I am reticent to try channels that I don’t have familiarity in, however, which makes the admonition to “not dismiss any traction channel” ((Weinberg, pg. 20)) one that I need to hear. I could stand up a website in a couple weeks, but executing a publicity stunt is daunting. A sense of the customers will make a difference in selecting the channel, for example, a newspaper ad may be the most effective for fifty-year-old business people who ride the Metra to work in downtown Chicago.

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