As mentioned in chapter 1, everyone approaches traction channels with biases. This first step is meant to help you systematically counteract your channel biases. That is, it is important that you not dismiss any traction channel in this step. You should be able to think of at least one idea for every channel - that's brainstorming!

In terms of research to feed your brainstorm, this book is a good start, but you should get much more specific to your company. You should know what marketing strategies have worked in your industry, as well as the history of companies in your space. It's especially important to understand how similar companies acquired customers over time, and how unsuccessful companies wasted their marketing dollars.

An easy way to organize your brainstorm is with a spreadsheet. We have an example one in the resources you can use as a starting point. Each column contains an idea of how you might use a particular channel. You can have many ideas per channel. Some other suggested columns to help round out your thinking:

• How probable does it seem that this idea could work (1-5)?
• What is the expected cost to acquire a customer through this idea?
• How many customers can you expect to acquire at that cost (before saturation)?
• What is the timeframe needed to run tests? Of course you won't know the right answers to all these questions, but you can make educated guesses.