pick the cheapest channel and do nothing else for months

the play

Run cheap tests on a few acquisition channels. Find the one where a user costs you less than they’re worth. Then stop everything else and put all your time and money into that one channel, for months, until it stops working.

what happened

The playbook comes from the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo’s founder) and Justin Mares. They call it Bullseye.

step	what you do
1. outer ring: what’s possible	brainstorm all 19 traction channels the book lists. dismiss none
2. middle ring: what’s probable	run cheap tests on the most promising few in parallel. the book says the drop-off in excitement “often occurs around the third channel”
3. inner ring: what’s working	”focus solely on the channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel”

Their reason: “At any stage in a startup’s life cycle, one traction channel usually dominates in terms of customer acquisition.” The book also quotes Peter Thiel: “If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business.”

Dropbox is the classic case of one engine carrying a company. Its growth came from word of mouth plus a referral program that rewarded both sides.

Dropbox	number
1 million users	7 months after public launch
4 million users	by January 2010
referral invites	2.8 million sent by users in the 30 days to April 2010

why it works

lever	what it does
focus compounds	every week on one channel teaches you its tricks. ten channels at once means you stay a beginner on all of them
the maths gets clear	one channel gives you one clean number for what a user costs and what they bring in
fundraising gets simple	if a user is worth more than they cost on one channel, an investor can see how money turns into growth
channels saturate	when the core channel slows, you run Bullseye again and find the next one

from my calls

you should not focus on multiple channels, you should just go on the lowest cost of acquisition channel.

just do one channel of acquisition for months at end.

I send founders the Bullseye framework a lot. After a seed round, raising turns on one comparison: what a user costs you to acquire (CAC) against what they bring in (ARPU). If ARPU beats CAC on a single channel, you can raise a big round on that alone.

Two things I keep repeating:

	what I say
a dud campaign	it feels like failure. run it anyway. a channel you’ve ruled out with real data is progress
tiny depositors	don’t count them as users. a wallet with a few dollars in it will flatter your CAC and wreck your ARPU

cost vs payoff

	what
cost	a few weeks of cheap tests that mostly fail
cost	ignoring channels that look exciting
payoff	one channel you understand deeply
payoff	a CAC vs ARPU number you can raise on
payoff	a repeatable process for finding the next channel when this one saturates

how to steal it

	crypto app	consumer app
channels worth testing	KOLs on X, Telegram groups, onchain airdrops or quests, partner integrations, ecosystem grants and hackathons	paid social, search, creators, referrals, app store search, partnerships
a cheap test	one small campaign per channel with a tracking link and a fixed budget	same
what counts as a user	a wallet that deposits above a real threshold and comes back	an account that completes the core action and comes back
the number	CAC per real user vs revenue per user	same
then	all budget and time on the winner for months	same

Run it like this:

List every channel you could use.
Pick the most promising three. Test each cheaply, with the same budget and a clear definition of a real user.
Compare CAC and ARPU per channel.
Put everything into the winner. Stop the rest.
Re-run the tests when the winner’s CAC starts climbing.

watch-outs

watch-out	what to do
counting the wrong users	set a deposit or activity threshold before the test. don’t count tiny depositors
quitting the core channel too early	give it months before you judge it
staying after it saturates	when CAC climbs for weeks, go back to step one
the channel owner changes the rules	have the next-best channel tested and ready