Find What Worked and Do More of It

Why it matters

Up to now, you have been trying almost everything — DMs, posts, community threads, cold outreach — because you did not know yet what would work. That was the right move for Launch and Sell. It is the wrong move now. Trying everything forever means you are always a beginner at every channel and never good at any of them.

Somewhere in your outreach tracker and your payment history is a pattern: a channel that produced more replies, more users, or more dollars than the others, even if it was not the one you expected. Maybe it was one specific online community, not general posts. Maybe it was DMs to people who already followed you, not cold strangers. That pattern is easy to miss because early data is noisy, and it is tempting to just keep doing a bit of everything.

Today’s job is to stop guessing and actually look at the numbers you already have. You will count touches, users, and dollars per channel, and pick one to go deep on for the next several weeks. Going deep does not mean abandoning everything else forever — it means giving your best channel a real, focused shot instead of a scattered one, because that is how you actually reach the Grow stage’s First $1K.

What to watch for

Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups

• Watch for the idea of finding your single best channel before trying to diversify into many.
• Notice how he tells founders to talk to their own users to learn where they actually came from.
• Skip the parts aimed at large teams with dedicated growth staff; you are doing this alone, by hand.

Start with Claude

Bring your actual outreach and payment records to Claude and let it help you organize the pattern — it should not guess at your best channel without your real numbers.

I'm building a Channel Scorecard for the Grow stage of Make First. Here's my outreach tracker and payment history: [paste or describe the data — channel, date, whether it led to a user or a sale].

Help me organize this into a scorecard with touches, users, and dollars per channel. Don't tell me which channel to pick until we've actually tallied the numbers together — ask me clarifying questions about anything that looks incomplete or inconsistent first. Once we have real totals, ask me questions about why the top channel might be working, and help me write a short, honest decision paragraph about which one I'll focus on next.