You’ve identified your customer… now try finding one
You’ve got a persona and an hypothesis, but no one to talk to. Here’s the four-step framework for finding your customers where they already are.
Hey friends 👋
You did the work:
Personas. Jobs-to-be-done. Psychographic profile. A three-paragraph narrative about a day in their life.
You know exactly who your early adopter is, and it’s time to sell!
But… where are they?
You’ve run ads… no one clicks.
You’ve cold-called… it’s never the right contact.
You’ve gone to conferences… they stroll past your booth.
Stop the grind. You need a system for finding customers where they already are — just waiting to give you their money.
It’s called channel hacking.
Let’s dive deep 👇
Let’s start with a less-than-obvious question:
What the heck’s a channel, anyway?
LinkedIn is not a channel. Neither is TikTok nor Reddit.
They’re platforms. Saying “my customers are on LinkedIn” isn’t much more useful than saying “my customers are on the internet,” because so are 1.2B other professionals.
A channel is much more specific:
Cold outreach to ops managers at Series A B2B SaaS companies via LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Organic posts in the #OperationsLeaders hashtag, Monday mornings, with a comment-first reply strategy
A sponsored slot in the Ops Nation newsletter (12k subscribers, your exact ICP)
A thread-reply strategy in
r/operationstargeting active questions about your problem spaceA co-marketing arrangement with a consultant who already serves your customers
This reframe matters because it’s what makes the next step possible: actually getting in front of them.
And let’s talk about how.
Four steps to finding any customer
Channel hacking is a framework we developed at the Traction Lab to find anybody you might want to get in front of, and it’s dead simple.
Step 1 — Ideation
List every channel where your early adopter might plausibly be found.
Every single one.
Don’t filter while you’re generating. This step is quantity before quality. Not “would this work?” Not “is this realistic?” Just: could they be here?
Communities. Subreddits. Newsletters. Conferences. Podcasts. Slack groups. LinkedIn niches. Cold email. Paid social. Organic social. Influencer partnerships. Co-marketing arrangements. Industry events. Trade associations. Job boards. Even Craigslist.
Go wide.
Brainstorming is not the time to be critical — or even realistic.
Target 15–30 channels minimum. Most founders hit five and stop; they’ve covered the obvious ones and are starting to repeat themselves. That’s the groan zone — push past it.
The channels past ten are usually the most interesting, because nobody else thought of them either.
Step 2 — Rank
Now score each channel on two factors:
Customer density — how many of your target customers are actually there?
Ease of access — how hard is it to get in front of them? Time, effort, money, etc.
These are prior probabilities. As much as possible, base them on evidence. If you have no evidence, on reasonable inference.
Then plot every channel on a 2×2 grid.
Each channel will land in one of four quadrants:
Gold mine — high density, easy access
Moonshot — high density, hard access
Quick win — low density, easy access
Questionable — low density, hard access
Step 3 — Decide
Work the gold mine first.
If you’re lucky enough to have multiple gold mines, pick the one with the highest customers-per-unit-of-effort and start there.
One important note: if you map all your channels and every quadrant looks bad — nothing dense, nothing accessible — that’s not a framework failure.
That’s a signal. And a common one!
Either your research is incomplete, or your customer definition is wrong. Something upstream is broken. Go back and revisit who you’ve identified as your early adopter before you keep going.
Don’t skip past this check! A bad map means you’re solving the wrong problem.
Step 4 — Experiment
Your highest-ranked channel gets a test.
But only a small one.
Do not pour real budget into a channel before you’ve run a single experiment. Do not block three months of calendar time for outreach on a channel you’ve never tried.
Not yet.
What “small” means depends on the channel — one week of outreach, one post, one $50 ad spend, one cold email sequence to 20 people.
The goal isn’t to win on that channel. The goal is to find out whether your ranking was right before you commit.
I’ve written about experimentation at length — what a valid test looks like, how to set one up so the data is actually interpretable, and how to avoid celebrating noise as signal.
Go read those if you haven’t.
Short version: the experiment tells you whether the channel is what you thought it was.
Then double down or move to the next one on the list.
What this looks like in practice
Airbnb was trying to tackle demand-side acquisition.
Getting hosts to list their space — the supply side — was manageable. You could reach homeowners through direct outreach, referral programs, and local community events.
Distributed, but findable.
Short-term renters were much harder. Tens of millions of people who needed a place to stay in a city they didn’t live in. And it’s transient!
How do you find them before they’ve decided where to book?
The key insight: they were already with the competitor.
Craigslist.
Craigslist had the density. Millions of people were actively searching for short-term housing in every major market every day.
High density. Clear as day once you looked.
So they built an API integration that automatically cross-posted Airbnb listings to Craigslist. Renters found the listings, clicked through to Airbnb, and booked. The demand base started building.
And when Airbnb no longer needed the integration, they shut it down.
This is what Step 3 actually means. Craigslist was a gold mine — massive density, relatively easy access.
Most founders who can’t find customers aren’t bad at selling.
They just picked two channels and crossed their fingers.
Channel hacking changes the question. Instead of, “Why can’t I get anyone on the phone?”, ask: “Where is the best place to get in front of customers?” That’s a solvable problem.
Map it. Rank it. Choose one. Test it.
Your customers are somewhere. Go find out where.
Until next week,
—jdm