Where do the next 1,000 customers come from?

The product

<the product, and its domain if it has one>

FINDING URLS. Several tools take a URL and cannot search for one — social_linkedin_posts, social_reddit_posts, social_reddit_comments, company_jobs, company_person, web_fetch. When you need a page, find its URL with YOUR OWN web search first, using a site: filter. That costs nothing and is exact. web_search does the same job for a billed call and is the fallback when you have no search of your own. Never construct a URL from a company name: a wrong URL comes back as a dead page, which reads as an absence of evidence rather than as your mistake.

BATCHING. The keyword tools bill once per call however many terms you send — keyword_volume takes 1,000, keyword_intent 1,000, keyword_overview 700, keyword_ideas 200. Pool your terms and send them in one call rather than looping. A batch whose rows exceed one response comes back trimmed and says how many rows it held versus returned: size the next batch from that figure and send the terms you did not get. A term missing from a trimmed response was withheld, NOT measured at zero. Scoring it as zero is the single most common way one of these runs reaches a confident wrong answer.

Balfour's rule governs this whole run: products are built to fit channels; channels do not mold to products. So the first question is never "which channel should we try" but "which channels can a product with these characteristics survive in". And distribution follows a power law — the companies that get to real scale take 70%+ of their growth from one channel. A run that ends with four channels ranked equally has not made the decision it was run to make.

1. Write the product's characteristics down first

Four attributes decide channel fit, and all four are known before any call:

  PRICE / ACV         what one customer is worth in year one

  TIME TO VALUE       hours from signup to the promised outcome

  VALUE BREADTH       how much of the addressable population it applies to

  FREQUENCY           how often the job recurs

Then apply the constraints, which are arithmetic rather than opinion:

• Paid needs quick time to value and a transactional model that returns

  the cash before the ad bill. Sub-$100 ACV with a 30-day sales cycle cannot

  fund clicks.

• Search needs a problem people put into words before they buy. A problem

  with no query has no search channel, whatever its size.

• Virality needs the product to be better with more users, and a short

  cycle. Bolted-on referral schemes are not this.

• Sales needs an ACV that pays a salary, and a buyer with a budget line.
• App store needs the buying decision to happen inside a store.

Rule out the impossible ones now, in writing, with the number that rules them out. That is half the answer and it costs nothing.

2. Measure each surviving channel with its own instrument

Search

• keyword_ideas on the problem, then keyword_volume and

  `keyword_intent` on everything it returns.

• Cluster into topics, not keywords. Ethan Smith's test: two terms belong

  on one page when the same domains rank for both, and on separate pages when

  they do not. Run `domain_serp_rivals` on each candidate head term and

  compare the domain lists. Sizing a "keyword" that is really six topics

  overstates the channel; splitting one topic into six pages loses to whoever

  did not.

• keyword_difficulty on the head term of each cluster is the cost of entry.
• domain_top_pages on whoever owns the cluster today shows the page TYPE

  that wins it — a listicle, a comparison, a tool, a template. That is what you

  would have to build, not merely what you would have to write.

• domain_traffic or domain_overview on those winners sizes the prize.

Paid

• keyword_forecast at a realistic bid gives clicks and cost at volume;

  divide by your funnel rate for a CAC that is measured rather than assumed.

• ads_advertisers on the money terms, then ads_creatives. An advertiser

  running the same creative 90+ days is proof the channel pays for someone with

  a business model like theirs — check that it IS like yours before borrowing

  the conclusion.

App store

• app_search on the buyer's phrase, app_keywords on the incumbent, and

  `app_top_charts` for the category's traffic shape.

Video, community and social

• social_youtube_search on the buyer's question. View counts on a

  how-to video are unmet demand with a timestamp, and the channel that made it

  is a distribution partner you could pay.

• social_reddit_posts on the communities where the problem is discussed,

  for whether recommendations actually happen there or whether it is a

  complaint board.

Sales and outbound

• company_jobs on competitors' listings. A competitor hiring SDRs and AEs

  has concluded their buyer needs a human; a competitor hiring content and

  lifecycle has concluded the opposite. Their conclusion is evidence, not

  proof — but it is evidence that cost them a salary.

3. Score the survivors on one table

  Channel | Reachable/mo | CAC | Payback | Time to first result | Ceiling | Product change required

Ceiling is the one column teams skip and the one that decides the year: a channel that can only ever deliver 300 customers a month is not a growth strategy for a company that needs 3,000, however good its CAC.

4. Commit to one

Name it. State its CAC, its ceiling, and the product change it demands — there is almost always one, because the product is what moves. Name the second channel only as the hedge, and say the specific number that would make you switch to it. Then name the cheapest experiment that would prove or kill the first inside 30 days.

RULES THAT MAKE THE OUTPUT TRUSTWORTHY

• Cite the tool and the argument behind every number you state.
• Distinguish measured (a tool returned it) from inferred (you reasoned to it).
• State the strongest evidence AGAINST your conclusion before your conclusion.
• Absence of a signal is not evidence of absence. Name which instrument was

  blind and why.

• Coverage is public data and varies by query, country, and date. A thin

  result is a thin result, not an empty market.

• If the data does not settle it, say INCONCLUSIVE and name the one call that

  would settle it. An unspent budget and an uncertain answer at the same time

  is a failed run; so is a confident answer the data did not support.

Deliver

The one channel, its numbers, the product change, the 30-day test, and the list of channels you ruled out with the figure that ruled each one out.