☕ Hey! Sippers,

Here are this week’s notes!

Bullseye Framework: A Three-Step Approach to Finding Your Traction Channel

In the quest to find the most effective traction channel for your business, it can be challenging to navigate through the numerous options available. To address this challenge, we have developed a straightforward framework called Bullseye. Inspired by Peter Thiel’s insights, Bullseye helps you identify the optimal traction channel that will drive your business’s growth.

Outer Ring: Exploring Possibilities The first step in the Bullseye framework involves brainstorming all possible traction channels. Imagine where you would advertise offline or which audience would be ideal for a speech. Envision success in each channel and document your ideas in the outer ring.

Counteracting Biases: It’s crucial to recognize and overcome any biases towards certain traction channels. Don’t dismiss any channel at this stage. Instead, generate at least one idea for each channel. Many founders make the mistake of not thoroughly exploring each channel, resulting in missed opportunities. Identify a viable channel strategy for each of the nineteen traction channels.

Conducting Research: While this book provides a starting point, it’s essential to gather industry-specific information. Familiarize yourself with successful marketing strategies in your industry and study the acquisition methods of similar companies. Understanding the history of customer acquisition will inform your brainstorming process.

Middle Ring: Assessing Probabilities The second step of Bullseye involves running low-cost traction tests for the most promising channels. Promote your best channel ideas from the outer ring to the middle ring.

Prioritizing Promising Channels: Some channels will stand out as particularly exciting and promising. Identify these channels by observing a decline in enthusiasm for other ideas, usually occurring after the third channel. Aim to have multiple channels in the middle ring, allowing you to run parallel tests efficiently.

Designing Traction Tests: Create inexpensive tests to evaluate the effectiveness of each channel. The tests should answer three key questions: 1) Cost of customer acquisition, 2) Potential customer reach, and 3) Relevance of acquired customers to your business. The next chapter will provide tactics for organizing and conducting these tests. Throughout the book, you’ll find specific ideas for testing each traction channel.

Avoiding Premature Scaling: Some founders make the mistake of scaling their marketing efforts too soon. Remember that the goal of testing is not to achieve significant traction yet. Instead, focus on gathering data and validating assumptions quickly. Design smaller-scale tests that require minimal upfront cost and effort. For example, compare the effectiveness of running four Facebook ads versus forty.

Inner Ring: Identifying the Core Channel The third and final step of Bullseye is to zero in on the traction channel that shows the most promise for your startup—the core channel.

Identifying the Core Channel: If one of the traction channels tested in the middle ring yields promising results, redirect all your traction efforts and resources toward it. You have hit the Bullseye by finding your core channel.

Optimizing Growth: The core channel dominates customer acquisition at each stage of a startup’s life cycle. By focusing exclusively on the core channel, you can extract maximum traction. Continually experiment and optimize growth tactics within this channel. As you delve deeper, you’ll discover effective strategies that can be scaled until they reach saturation or become cost-inefficient.

Avoiding Distractions: It’s common for founders to keep pursuing distracting marketing efforts in secondary channels, even after identifying a core channel. This mistake stems from successful tests in those secondary channels. However, it’s crucial to prioritize the core channel as it offers more significant potential for growth. While other channels may support the core strategy, they shouldn’t be pursued simultaneously.

Repeating the Process: If none of the tested channels show promise, it’s essential to repeat the Bullseye framework. Analyze the data from the tests to identify customer preferences and pinpoint areas that require improvement. Iterate the process until a promising traction channel emerges, indicating that your product is resonating with customers.

Via, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth.

Be Creative, Do the Work, and Ship It.

If you subscribe to Godin’s blog, you’ll discover a fresh post awaiting you each morning. Bright and early at 4:30 am, Godin diligently writes his blog post and promptly delivers it to his audience. This is his daily routine, and he remains committed to it, even when he lacks motivation.

Godin is not only a creative professional but also an immensely successful one. With 19 best-selling books under his belt, he has made a name for himself. Additionally, he is the visionary behind the esteemed Akimbo workshop platform for creatives and entrepreneurs, as well as the globally renowned 30-day alt MBA course. If there’s anyone who possesses the “creative license” to guide us on the path of creativity, it’s Godin.

Creativity is an innate human ability, awaiting our willingness to embrace it and stay dedicated. However, we often abandon the pursuit of a creative life—a chance to be generous, solve problems, and pursue our passions. Numerous reasons contribute to this tendency. Some of us believe that a fleeting mood sparks creativity or is a talent exclusive to a chosen few.

We treat creativity as a delicate magic trick or as a gift from the muse. Godin challenges this notion and asserts,

“The magic of the creative process is that there’s no magic.”

Once we acknowledge this truth, it becomes more accessible and more empowering to engage in creative work. It stems from a commitment to persistently carry out “the work,” even when inspiration is lacking.

The consistent practice serves as the birthplace of creativity, and our approach to this practice holds significance. If we aspire to enhance our innate creative capacity or transform our creative passions into a profession, we must adopt a professional attitude toward our practice. We need to show up, put in the work, and hold ourselves accountable by sharing it with our chosen audience—be it our mothers at the outset.

Before we dive into our creative practice and inundate our mothers, it is crucial to define the concept of “shipping creative work.”

Shipping refers to sharing our work because it only matters if it reaches others. Creativity denotes that we are not mere cogs in the system but problem-solvers and generous leaders who improve the world by forging new paths. And work emphasizes that creativity is not a mere hobby—it has the potential to yield financial rewards in the future.

Godin’s message is simple: creativity requires practice. However, simplicity should not be confused with easiness. How often do we find excuses to avoid engaging in creative work and sharing it? This is often due to our pursuit of perfection or our perception of ourselves as imposters. Moreover, we fear harsh criticism and believe that various constraints hinder our ability to create and share our work.

Via, The Practice, Seth Godin.