Bullseye Model – Identifying Effective Communication Channels for Startups
Last updated: September 25, 2025 Read in fullscreen view
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The Bullseye Framework can be understood as a “focus model,” a solution that helps businesses identify their most effective communication channel, thereby addressing the growth challenge. This framework is implemented in three stages, corresponding to the three rings of the model.
Today, businesses have more and more options to communicate their products or services to the public: mass media, email marketing, blogs, promotional events… Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, once said: “Most businesses never get even a single distribution channel to work. Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure.” So, how can we find the most effective distribution or communication channel? The Bullseye Framework might be the right solution.
The Outer Ring: List All Possible Channels
The first step is to list every potential channel and draft a content distribution plan for each. For every channel, come up with at least one idea or approach. For example:
- If you plan offline advertising, where would you organize it?
- If your plan is to give a product talk, who would be the audience?
- If you want to make a video ad, what would the content be?
It is also important to study how competitors are doing their marketing: how they attract customers, and how failed companies have burned money on ineffective channels so you can avoid repeating those mistakes. These insights will give you more ideas when listing potential approaches in the outer ring.
The Middle Ring: Promising Channels
The second step is to run traction tests for the most promising channels you identified. Usually, only a few ideas from the outer ring will stand out as interesting and potentially effective — these are moved into the middle ring.
For each channel in the middle ring, conduct a low-cost test to evaluate its effectiveness. You can test multiple channels in parallel. Each test should answer these questions:
- How much does it cost to acquire a customer through this channel?
- How many customers can be acquired in total from this channel?
- Do the acquired customers match your target audience?
Many businesses make the mistake of over-committing resources at this stage. Remember, these tests are not about optimizing each channel to perfection but simply about identifying which one could make a real difference. Your key concern at this point is speed — how quickly you can gather data and validate assumptions.
When testing the middle ring, the spirit of the Bullseye Framework is aligned with the Lean Startup approach: minimizing cost, time, and resources. However, Lean Startup focuses on product development, while Bullseye focuses on growth channels. Businesses should ideally apply both frameworks simultaneously to solve two critical problems: (i) building the right product, and (ii) finding the right way to bring it to customers.
The Inner Ring: The Most Effective Channel
The third and final step is to focus primarily on the single most effective content distribution channel for your business (based on the middle ring tests). At this stage, you have identified the Bullseye — the “center of focus” for your communication strategy.
For each stage in a product or service’s lifecycle, there will usually be one primary channel that drives customer acquisition. That is why businesses should focus their resources on this single channel. Once chosen, continuously experiment to find growth optimizations within this channel. As you dive deeper, you’ll discover effective strategies and fully exploit the growth potential until the channel no longer works due to market saturation or rising costs.
Although you focus resources on one main channel, you can still use supporting channels in parallel (with limited resources). For example, if your main growth channel is viral marketing, you can amplify it through email marketing or existing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok. In this case, viral marketing is the primary channel, while the others act as complementary ones.
If no channel proves effective after middle ring testing, don’t hesitate to go back to the outer ring for a new review. This time, you’ll already have data on which channels didn’t work and why, allowing you to generate better options. However, if after repeating this process multiple times no channel shows promise, it may be a sign that you need to reconsider the product itself.
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