The Bullseye search: brainstorm, test, commit
Once your ACV has narrowed the field, you need a process to find the one channel inside it. The canonical one is Bullseye, three concentric rings that take you from breadth to a single commitment. Its discipline is that breadth is cheap and commitment is not, so you spread wide only where it costs you nothing, and concentrate hard everywhere it counts.
Outer ring: brainstorm all nineteen
The outer ring is a brainstorm across all nineteen traction channels. For each one, force yourself to write down a realistic strategy, not a dismissal. The point is not to commit to nineteen things; it is to stop your existing biases from quietly deleting channels you have never seriously considered. Founders who skip this step almost always default to whatever channel they personally find comfortable, which is rarely the channel their product and price actually fit. Brainstorming all nineteen is how you let the fit surface rather than assuming it.
Middle ring: three or four cheap parallel tests
From the outer ring you promote the three or four most promising channels to the middle ring and run cheap parallel tests. These tests are not the channel. You are not building the machine yet. You are buying a single, fast learning signal that answers three questions: roughly what does this cost, can I actually reach my customers here, and do the customers I reach convert? Keep the tests small and time-boxed. You are reading a signal, not optimising a programme, and the whole value of running them in parallel is that you get comparable reads at the same time instead of sequentially guessing.
Inner ring: commit to the one
The inner ring is the decision the whole process exists to produce: focus exclusively on the single channel showing traction. Not the two that looked promising. The one. This is where most founders flinch, because committing to one feels like abandoning the others. It is not. The others are waiting for you to re-run the search later, if the first channel saturates. Right now, the highest-value thing you can do is pour everything into the one that the tests told you fits.
Balfour's matrix as the scoring tool
To make the middle-ring decision less of a gut call, score your candidates on a matrix. First set your optimisation priority: are you optimising for learning, for volume, or for cost? That single choice reorders everything. Then list your real constraints, time, money, audience, legal. Then score each channel on six attributes: targeting, cost, input time, output time, control and scale. The matrix turns a vague "this feels right" into a structured comparison, and it makes explicit why two founders with the same product might rightly pick different channels: their optimisation priorities and constraints differ. Pick one, at most two, channels as hypotheses to carry forward, and let the inner ring resolve which one wins.