Phase I is very product focused and involves pursuing initial traction while also building your initial product. This often means getting traction in ways that don’t scale—giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you have relationships with, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.

over time, all marketing channels become saturated. As more companies discover an effective strategy, it becomes crowded and expensive or ignored by consumers, thus becoming much less effective.

Traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup.

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. If you were to advertise offline, where would be the best place to do it? If you were to give a speech, who would be the ideal audience? Imagine what success would look like in each channel, and write it down in your outer ring.

Press is one of the single most effective things for pushing people over the edge and confirming they did the right thing.

someone just starting out in this channel should begin testing just four ads. Four ads will give you a good baseline for the performance of SEM as a whole, while still allowing you to test different messaging, demographics, and landing pages.

you should also be testing additional channel strategies within your core channel. These resemble middle ring tests in that they should initially be cheap and fast and answer the same basic questions as middle ring tests. The goal here is to see if there is a better channel strategy you should be using within your core channel.

In your company, your milestones will be different, but the point is to be critical and strategic in deciding what to include. That’s why it is called the Critical Path. For example, you may think that to reach your traction goal you will need to hire three people, add features A, B, and C to your product, and engage in marketing activities X, Y, a

The importance of choosing the right traction goal cannot be overstated. Are you going for growth or profitability, or something in between? If you need to raise money in X months, what traction do you need to show to do so? These are the types of questions that help you determine the right traction goal. Once that is defined, you can work backward