This is one question every business wants an answer for. What are the different growth channels or methods to acquire customers? Beyond the usual social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, what are the other niche channels that could really help find prospects and promote your product. In this webinar, Nichole Elizabeth (Community Growth, Zest.is) will help you understand: - Different growth channels to acquire SaaS customers - Developing a compelling value proposition - Identifying quick wins and long-term channels for growth

2. Set up a pre-marketing foundation (for retention)
As with any customer acquisition, you first have to make sure you’ve got a solid foundation before you get
into marketing efforts.
● Identify your ideal customers
● Build your alpha users group / the foundation of your community. Who are your early adopters?
They will help you to shorten your way achieving PMF and they will serve as your brand advocates.
● Gather qualitative data
● Develop a compelling value proposition

3. Identify your ideal customers
● Who are they?
● Where do they hang out?
● What are their desired outcomes?
● What words do they use to describe
their problems and desired outcomes?
● What do they expect to get from you?
● What do they hope to get?
Don’t know? Don’t guess.
Ask them.

4. Gather qualitative data
Qualitative data – information gathered from ideal customers by open-ended questions – is the
foundation of success for startups, SaaS companies, and anyone else who thinks they have a solution to
a problem that could potentially make money.
Asking real people pertinent questions allows entrepreneurs to avoid making costly assumptions, and
most importantly, lays the groundwork for the kind of customer success that leads to retention and the
potential for wild, insane, Google-level growth.
As Steve Blank says, “Get out of the building.”
I recommend reading and working through his book, The Startup Owner’s Manual. There’s worksheets in
the back.
Use tools such as Wootric, Typeform to gather customer feedback.

5. Create a compelling value proposition
Value propositions are complicated, but when you distill it down, the idea is really simple: To get
customers, you have to tell them why they should work with you based on what you uniquely offer that is
also important to them.
A value proposition:
1. Defines who your ideal customer is
2. States what your product does
3. Establishes why you’re unique
4. Shows the end benefit
I recommend reading and working through the book, Value Proposition Design.

6. Traction & Growth Channels
Once you’ve got a foundation, “traction channels” come into play, and a very useful tool called the
“Bullseye Framework” introduced in the book, Traction. (In this book they identify 19 channels.)
Traction channels are marketing and distribution channels that focus on customer acquisition.
They’re where you strategically choose to place your content to attract leads.
Most businesses flood just a handful of channels and ignore the rest. They choose the ones they’re most
familiar with, but you really can’t know what channel will work best for your product or service, and
your audience, until you test.
And as Sujan Patel says, “Attempting to drive growth on multiple user acquisition channels divides your
resources and dilutes your focus.”

7. The Bullseye Framework
“We use the Bullseye metaphor in our
framework because you’re aiming
for the Bullseye—the one traction
channel that will unlock your
next growth stage.
Using Bullseye to find your channel is a
five-step process: brainstorm, rank,
prioritize, test, and focus on what works.
Rinse, repeat.”
Brian Balfour

8. Bullseye in a nutshell, according to Traction
Step 1: Brainstorm at least one idea for how you could use each type of traction channel.
Step 2: Rank your ideas according to which seem most promising, which could possibly work, and which
seem unlikely. It might be helpful to give yourself a measurable goal.
Step 3: Prioritize – Choose three channels that seem most promising.
Step 4: Test your three channels with the aim of finding out Cost to Acquire for each channel, how many
customers are available through each channel, and whether the customers you are getting through each
channel fit into your ideal customer profile.
Step 5: Focus on the most promising channel. Weinberg and Mare recommend focusing on one
traction channel at a time, the idea being “At any stage in a startup’s lifecycle, one traction channel
dominates in terms of customer acquisition.”

9. My list of traction and growth channels to test
Quick wins: Channels that don’t require 6+ months to get results.
● BetaList - A community of makers and early adopters showcasing their startups and exchanging
feedback.
● Product Hunt Ship & Product Hunt
● Social Media - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat
● Contests, giveaways - Try Wishpond - there’s 10 types of contests.
● Events - Launch parties, festivals, conferences – 32 examples of marketing using events.
● Introduce your product with an article on Medium – Examples: Welcome to Glitch and Introducing
Yo Stories.
● Press / PR Campaigns:
○ HARO
○ JustReachOut is a tool that was created specifically for startups to pitch journalists (paid)

10. My list of traction and growth channels to test
● Paid campaigns:
○ Google Adwords, The Yahoo! Bing Network
○ Facebook & Instagram Ads
○ LinkedIn Ads
○ Pinterest Promoted Pins
○ Quuu Promote
○ Zest.is (free) & Zest Content Boost (paid)
○ Taboola and/or Outbrain (for native advertising)
○ Twitter Ads
○ Snapchat Ads
○ Appsumo & SaaS Invaders
○ Quora Ads
○ YouTube Advertising
○ Sponsor newsletters - try Upstart

11. My list of traction and growth channels to test
Long-term gains (channels usually based on creating high-quality, relevant content)
● Build long-term relationships within communities
○ Brand, Build + Launch
○ CXL
○ Ladies in SaaS
○ Quora
○ SaaS Growth Hacks
○ SaaS Revolution
○ Startup Product Launches
○ The Copywriter Club
○ The Humans Strike Back
○ Tech Ladies
○ Traffic & Copy
○ We Optimize
○ Word Workers

12. My list of traction and growth channels to test
● Communities to distribute content, (but be an active member - it’s still about relationships)
○ Zest.is
○ Product Hunt (for e-books)
○ Growth Hackers
○ Inbound.org
○ Hacker News
Reddit
○ SaaS.Community
○ BizSugar
● Start your own community (ex: ProdPad - “99% of our cancellations are coming from customers who
weren’t part of our community.”)
● Submit your product to the App Store and/or Google Play
● SEO / Inbound Marketing
● Podcasts – Hailey Friedman wrote about this, and podcast advertising and interviews really are a
great way to get in front of an educated, friendly audience.
● Email marketing / Newsletters

13. My list of traction and growth channels to test
● Referrals / viral loops / build virality into the product (like DropBox)
● Medium – here’s a list of the top Medium publications where you can submit your Medium articles
○ The Mission
○ Startup Grind
○ The Startup
○ ThinkGrowth.org
○ Hacker Noon
● Slack Groups - list of over 1,000
● Slideshares
● Integrate with other tools, like Intercom, Slack, Segment, or Zapier
● Newsletters – Submit your content to curators (ex: Mattermark Daily)
● Social Media
● Guest post on sites like HubSpot, Moz, to build brand recognition
● Revamp and re-purpose older content (infographics, podcasts, short videos)