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Concept

The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework is Weinberg and Mares's method for finding a startup's traction channel: brainstorm every one of the nineteen channels, rank them into three rings, run cheap tests on the three most promising, and then concentrate everything on the one that works.

Traction's central argument is that which channel works for a company is nearly unpredictable in advance, and that founders lose because they guess. They pick the channel they know, usually social media or PR, and run it at a quarter effort alongside five others. Bullseye replaces the guess with a process. The outer ring is every channel, including the unfashionable ones the founder would never have considered, each with a note on how it might work for this product. The middle ring holds the most promising handful, chosen honestly. The inner ring is the three best, and each gets a cheap, fast experiment measured in customers acquired and what they cost, not in traffic. One usually stands out. That channel gets the whole effort until it saturates, and only then does the process start again. The discipline is in the concentration: a channel run at full effort teaches more in a month than six channels teach in a year.

A real-life example

A B2B startup in Istanbul selling payroll software to restaurants assumed Instagram was its channel and spent six months on content that produced two customers. Bullseye forced the founders to list all nineteen channels, and engineering as marketing made the inner ring: a free calculator that works out overtime and holiday pay under Turkish labour law. Three weeks of the calculator, with a small search-ad budget behind it, produced forty demo requests and nine paying restaurants. Every marketing hour went to free tools after that.

How to use it

  1. 1List all nineteen channels with one honest sentence each on how it could work for you, including the ones you find embarrassing.
  2. 2Pick the three best for the inner ring and run a cheap test on each, measured in customers acquired and cost per customer.
  3. 3Commit fully to the one that worked and squeeze it until it stops yielding; do not run six channels at a quarter effort.