Choose Your First Three Growth Channels
A founder framework for selecting a focused channel portfolio based on evidence, economics, and team advantage.
The framework
- Name the customer moment and measurable growth constraint.
- Choose one intent channel, one relationship channel, and one compounding loop.
- Define the smallest credible test and its stop condition.
- Review the portfolio as a system, not three independent campaigns.
Supporting topic hubs
Relevant advisory paths
Tactics to examine
Localize community answers where answer-engine mentions are missing
Use market-level citation monitoring to seed useful, locally relevant answers through community advocates.
Build community content from recurring buyer questions
Mine high-intent questions in communities and answer them with durable, source-backed pages.
Give community advocates a weekly answer gap brief
Route the highest-impact unanswered questions to advocates with context, boundaries, and useful examples.
Let creators demonstrate the product in native short-form language
Brief creators on a problem and proof point, then let them adapt the story to the platform format.
Distribute reusable templates through creator remix loops
Publish a useful starting template and invite creators to remix it for their own audience and use case.
Make event inventory legible to search and community discovery surfaces
Use event-specific structured data and clear venue, date, and availability fields on every listing.
Ship a focused integration into a high-intent app marketplace
Use a marketplace listing as a distribution page, with a narrow use case, proof, and fast activation path.
Use event inventory as a structured marketplace acquisition surface
Publish each event as a canonical listing with Event structured data and a direct ticket action.
Put a marketplace offer inside a wallet discovery surface
Use wallet passes, reminders, or native discovery placements to bring an offer back at the moment of intent.
Add local payment methods before expanding a marketplace into a region
Map local payment preferences to the target market and measure authorization and conversion by method.
Use a one-developer integration as the first distribution wedge
Make the partner's proof-of-concept path short enough to become a publishable customer launch story.
Embed the conversion step inside the partner workflow
Let the partner keep the user journey while your product handles the trusted transaction or activation step.
Apply this with an operator
Diagnose your channel portfolio with Ian