The Six-Channel Filter
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
A decision rule for choosing acquisition channels instead of trying them all. Lerner argues there are only about six ways anyone learns about a new product in B2B or B2C: a salesperson, an ad, a partner, content or an influencer, SEO, or a referral. Every one of these channels is a power law, both in which posts or pages win and in which creators or sites capture the audience, so you have to be exceptionally good at a channel for it to work. Half-heartedly trying seven channels produces nothing in any of them. The filter is therefore to cross off the channels that cannot work on paper, keep the ones in harmony with your existing strengths, pick one or two, and pour everything into becoming world class at those.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
List the six channels
Write out the full set: sales, ads, partners, content or influencers, SEO, and referral. That is the whole menu for both B2B and B2C, which makes the problem tractable.
Pro tip Keeping the list to six stops the team inventing a longer menu of tactics dressed up as channels.
Watch out Individual platforms are not channels. Several social platforms may all be the same content channel.
- 2
Cross off what cannot work on paper
Reason each channel out logically before spending. Nobody refers a wart cream, because nobody asks their friends about warts. If the product does not monetise quickly at a high rate, ads will not work. If nobody searches for anything related to the product, SEO will not work.
Pro tip For SEO, check search volume, who currently ranks and their domain authority before writing a single page.
Watch out Crossing off three or four of six is normal and is the point of the exercise, not a sign you are being pessimistic.
- 3
Keep what plays to your strengths
Of the survivors, ask which are in harmony with the business you already are. If your strength is content creation, the channels that depend on content creation are the natural candidates.
Pro tip Also ask whether the channel needs the founder personally, since that determines whether it can scale without them.
Watch out A channel that works for someone else's company may require capabilities you do not have and would have to build from zero.
- 4
Pick one or two and commit
Narrow to a single channel, or at most two, and focus all your energy on becoming the best in the world at it, because that is what winning any channel requires.
Pro tip If one channel is clearly working and the others are not, double down there until it stops working, then reconsider.
Watch out Every channel is a power law twice over, across your own content and across all creators, so mediocre execution is indistinguishable from not showing up.
- 5
Cut the sevens
Kill the initiatives that score around seven out of ten. Obvious failures are easy to cut; the sevens survive, and each one costs headcount to hire and manage, complicates the customer proposition and slows the business down.
Pro tip For each surviving activity, name explicitly whether it is a passion project or a candidate growth lever, and treat the two differently.
Watch out Talented people attached to a cut initiative can usually be redeployed or helped to a better role, which is the humane version of this decision.
In the wild
On a team retreat in Turkey, Ali's team were trying to grow on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram simultaneously. They noticed Instagram was already their third biggest lead generation channel for book sales after YouTube and the email list, that Ali personally enjoys the behind-the-scenes content, and that podcast appearances could be chopped into reels without extra filming days from him. They paused the other four platforms. It felt frightening at first. Within about a week of focusing, a friend messaged asking what they were doing to grow so fast on Instagram.
→ Cutting four channels produced visible acceleration on the one they kept within a week.
Lerner uses a meditation app founder as the test case. If they told him over lunch that Instagram was really working and the other channels were poor, his advice would be to focus on Instagram until it stops working and worry about the rest afterwards. What most companies actually do is try all the channels and see what sticks, which fails because doing any one channel well is hard and doing all of them well is impossible.
→ One channel executed to a world-class standard beats seven executed adequately.
Common mistakes
Trying every channel to see what sticks
The default strategy in most companies. It fails because each channel's algorithm or ranking surfaces only the very best work, so partial effort spread across many channels loses in all of them.
Keeping the sevens because they are cheap
A seven out of ten initiative rarely gets killed because it is not obviously bad. But each one is a hire to manage, more complexity in the proposition and another direction for the team to run in.
Confusing diversification with growth
Ali added platforms partly to reduce dependence on YouTube. Lerner's counter is to be explicit about whether each one is a de-risking bet, a passion project or a real growth lever, and to de-risk the assumption before staffing it.
From the transcript
“I said seven but actually I think there's like six things if you include B2B and b2c businesses how would you learn about a new…”
“so any one of these things you decide to to do you have to be incredibly good at it to make it work so if…”
“so you can just apply that process and just pick two channels or one channel that should make sense for you yeah and then Focus…”
From the episode
How to Scale your Startup with Growth Levers: Matt Lerner