Choosing your first channels
Pick one or two places to look for first customers: start from the buyer, score what each channel asks of you and write each test down before you run it.
A channel is a repeatable way to put your product in front of the people who might buy it. For a first product, the useful question is not which channel is best in general. It is which one or two you can test properly with the time and attention you have. This article gives you a way to answer that question on paper, and it deliberately ranks nothing. Which channel works depends on who your buyer is, what you sell and what you are good at, and no list from outside your company can know those things.
Start from where the buyer already looks
Before listing channels, return to the first line of your positioning statement: who, specifically, has the problem. Then ask where those people already spend attention when they are looking for help with it. Write down actual places, not categories: a named online community, a search phrase they type, a trade event, a newsletter, a person whose recommendation they trust, a marketplace where they already buy.
If you cannot name a single place, you have found the real gap, and it is cheaper to fix by talking to five buyers than by trying channels. The first ten customers sequence describes how to build a list of real names and note where each came from.
The families of channels
Most channels for a first software product fall into a handful of families. The table describes what each asks of you. It is not a ranking and the order carries no meaning.
| Family | What it asks of you | A rule to read first |
|---|---|---|
| Direct outreach (email, calls, messages) | Time, a list of real names and a sendable message | Email is regulated; see the CAN-SPAM article |
| Search and written content | Pages that answer the questions buyers type, and patience | The search engine’s own documentation |
| Communities and forums | Taking part before promoting, and following each group’s rules | Disclosure rules if anyone is rewarded for mentioning you |
| Partners and marketplaces | A listing, an integration or an introduction from someone with the audience | The partner’s terms, and a contract worth reading |
| Referrals | Existing customers willing to introduce you | Rules on rewards and on email forwarding |
| Events and paid placement | Money or travel, and a clear audience | Platform advertising terms |
Treat the third column as a reminder that each family comes with someone else’s rules. A channel that breaks the rules of the place it uses will not survive a complaint.
What three public sources say about the rules
Three statements from public sources show how different the rules can be.
On email, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s compliance guide for business says “The law makes no exception for business-to-business email.” Sending to companies instead of consumers does not remove the obligations.
On referrals, the same guide says that when a seller pays or gives a benefit for generating traffic or for any form of referral, “the seller is likely to have compliance obligations under the CAN-SPAM Act.” A referral reward for forwarding an email can therefore change who is responsible for the message.
On communities and social posts, the FTC’s disclosure guidance for social media influencers says to “Disclose when you have any financial, employment, personal, or family relationship with a brand.” If you plan to ask friends, advisors or customers to mention your product in public, that advice applies to what they post and to how you ask.
On search, Google’s own SEO starter guide is a vendor document and should be read as Google’s description of its product. It says changes “might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months.” That is a statement about how long search takes to react, not a forecast for your site, and it is a reason to count search as a slow test and not a quick one.
Score what each channel asks of you
Pick the three families that fit your buyer’s habits and score each one on five questions. Use plain words, not numbers, if numbers feel false.
- Reach. Does the place contain the buyer from part 1 of your statement, in a form you can address?
- Cost of a first test. How many hours and how much money does one honest test take?
- Speed of signal. How soon will you know whether a person responded, and what counts as a response?
- Fit with you. Do you enjoy and tolerate the work? A solo founder who dislikes calls will not make forty of them.
- Rules and risk. What laws, platform terms or contracts apply, and who can check them?
The channel with the best answers across all five is the one to test first. If two tie, choose the one with the faster signal, because faster signals teach you more per week.
Write the test before you run it
For each channel you test, fill a small card before starting:
- Hypothesis. “Owners of two- to ten-person studios in [this community] will reply to a message about stalled client files.”
- Action. What exactly you will send, post or build, and how many times.
- Signal. What counts as success and what counts as a miss, in words you will not change afterwards. A reply, a booked call and a paid pilot are different signals.
- Stop rule. The date or count at which you stop and read the results, chosen by you, not a standard figure.
- Log. Where the raw results are stored: a spreadsheet row per contact is enough.
The card matters because a test without a stop rule never ends, and a test whose success was defined afterwards proves whatever you hoped. If you are the only person working on the product, keep the number of simultaneous tests at one or two, so that you can follow up on every response.
Read the results as a team of one
When a test ends, open the log and answer three questions. What did people say in their own words? Which objection appeared more than once? What would you change before the next round, the message, the audience or the channel? The pattern to watch for is a message that works with one audience and fails with another, which suggests that the channel was fine and the targeting was off.
A channel that produced nothing is not proof that the channel is poor. It may show that your message, list or timing was poor, which are all fixable. Keep a note of what you tried so that you do not repeat the same untested idea. The earn-your-first-customers playbook places channel tests inside a wider sequence, and the glossary defines CAC, the shorthand for what it costs to win a customer, if you want to compare channels by cost later, once you have enough customers for the number to mean something.
What this article cannot tell you
This article cannot tell you which channel will work for your product. It ranks nothing, and its table of families is an editorial grouping, not a classification taken from a source. The three cited documents are U.S. federal agency guidance and one vendor’s documentation, read on 2026-10-10; they say nothing about other countries’ email, privacy or advertising rules, and nothing about what any channel costs or returns. Rules about marketing messages, rewards and disclosures vary by jurisdiction and by platform, and they change. For anything that involves sending messages to strangers, paying for mentions or storing contact details, ask a qualified professional who knows the places where you will sell. This is general information as of 2026-10-10, not legal or financial advice. Nothing here is a forecast of response, cost or timing.
In the data
These figures describe U.S. businesses in general, not WE’s results. Each one names its source.
Show the data as a table
| Firm size | Share of employer firms, 2023 |
|---|---|
| 1 to 4 employees | 59.7% |
| 5 to 9 employees | 17.3% |
| 10 to 19 employees | 11.1% |
| 20 to 99 employees | 9.7% |
| 100 to 499 employees | 1.7% |
| 500 or more employees | 0.4% |
Employer firms only: businesses with no employees are not in these data. Firm size is the average of the current and prior year.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Dynamics Statistics, firm size , 2023
Retrieved 2026-10-16. Shares are published firm counts divided by the sum of the size classes in the firm-size file; the five largest classes are added together.
Sources
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide, Google Search Central documentation . Accessed October 10, 2026.
- CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business, U.S. Federal Trade Commission . Accessed October 10, 2026.
- Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers, U.S. Federal Trade Commission . Accessed October 10, 2026.
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