By Matty, founder of Vennio. A free spreadsheet template is at the bottom.

There is a scene near the end of The Shawshank Redemption. Red, the wonderful Morgan Freeman, is before the parole board for the umpteenth time. Exhausted by the process and the banality of the questioning, he’s asked to say if he is “rehabilitated”. “Well, now let me see,” starts Red, “I have no idea what that means.” He then opines over other words that he thinks may make up rehabilitation: regret, honesty, and candour. He finishes with the conclusion that the complexity of what he understands about his crime and his present situation cannot be condensed into a single word. “Rehabilitation, that’s a bullshit word.”

I feel this when well-meaning people ask about Vennio and traction.

“Traction? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means. To me, it’s a politician’s word. A buzzword used by guys in suits to tick a box. Do I have users? Yes. Are we growing? Every day. But if you’re asking me to hit an arbitrary metric just to say we have ‘traction,’ you’re looking at the wrong founder. I’m building Vennio for the long haul.”

However, unlike Red, we really should try to engage with well-meaning people on less confrontational terms. Regardless of the wish to only feed the good wolf inside of me, sometimes both of the wolves are very grumpy. Not knowing which to feed, I just throw a pack of chops into my corpus callosum and hope for the best. So, I was interested when a friend suggested I read Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg.

The TL;DR: Startups fail from poor distribution, not bad products. Authors Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares reveal 19 specific traction channels. Their “Bullseye Framework” helps founders test channels, isolate the winner, and trigger explosive growth. And for this founder, it’s both high-level strategic and actionable tactical enough to get me interested.

The shortcut that nearly happened

I started reading Traction over the weekend. Inspired and impatient, I wanted to get started straight away. Monday morning, I asked Claude if it knew the book. By sheer coincidence, it did! Within one reply it had produced an idea for each of the 19 channels and a ranked recommendation of which three to test.

Tidy. Fast. And completely against the point of the book.

The book’s argument is that your instinct for which channels fit your company is shared by every founder like you. Technical founders pick content and developer platforms. Sales founders pick outbound. Comfort is the enemy. And even if you are self-aware enough to recognise that you should move out of your comfort zone. Your discomfort has a comfort zone. The comfortable channels are crowded for exactly that reason. The value of brainstorming all 19 is that it forces you through the channels you’d never pick, which is where competitors aren’t.

Claude, it turns out, is also a founder who picks the comfortable channels. I told it to stop rushing to answers, and we started again.

The method

We agreed rules before generating anything:

Rule	Why
One channel per sitting	Covering all 19 in one go produces one obvious idea per channel. Focusing on a single channel forces you past the obvious ideas and into the ones you would not have thought of.
Minimum 10 ideas per channel, no quality bar	Judging ideas while generating them shuts the generation down. Bad ideas are allowed because volume is what produces the few good ones. If some ideas feel invalid, that means you are doing it right.
Nothing ranked, costed, or dismissed until all 19 are done	As soon as you start scoring, every new idea gets filtered against the scores before it is written down. The unusual ideas stop appearing, and those are the point of the exercise.
Start with the channels you’d never pick	The uncomfortable channels need the most effort, so do them while the discipline is fresh. I opened with offline ads, trade shows and affiliate programmes, the three I would have bet against.
Grey areas get tagged, not moved	Some ideas sit between two channels. Debating which category an idea belongs to feels rigorous but it is really a way of avoiding generating more ideas. Capture it once, flag the second channel, move on.
Everything lands in one spreadsheet	One row per idea. A sheet built for 19 rows invites 19 answers. A sheet built for 500 invites 500.

The routine was the same every time. I went first. A brain dump and no filter. Claude went second, with one job: push into the audiences and angles my list had ignored. Everything went into the sheet. Next channel.

Four channels in, Claude pointed out something mildly embarrassing: every single idea I’d generated targeted developers. All. Of. Them. Not a single thought for any of the other users we have. Vennio’s customers are builders, vibe coders, marketplaces, and AI agents, and most have never opened Reddit in their lives. Left to my own devices, I’d have built a channel strategy for a fraction of my market and called it “thorough”. Cheers Claude!

What came out

524 ideas across 19 channels. The shortcut offered 19. The sheet stays private. You get the method, not the homework. The pattern, though, isn’t secret. The surprises came from the channels I’d bet against. Whether they score is next week’s problem. They exist. Last Monday they didn’t.

A few, as evidence:

Walk a field service expo with no stand. Rooms full of software vendors whose products all contain a broken booking flow. Cost of a ticket. I’d never have considered a trade show. Attending one is a different thing from exhibiting at one.

Affiliate deals with accountants. They recommend operational tooling to small business clients constantly, and nobody markets APIs to them. Maximum discomfort. Zero competition for their attention.

A press comment prepared for every clock change. Daylight saving shifts twice a year. Every newsroom writes about time that week. Almost nobody has a scheduling infrastructure expert on file. A guaranteed news moment, twice annually, forever.

The counterparty claim loop. Every booking made through the platform touches a second party who didn’t choose it. That’s a growth graph hiding inside a product feature. It only surfaced because viral marketing got a full session instead of a bullet point.

None of these exist in Claude’s insta-reply.

What I’d tell you about doing this with an AI

Three things.

First, the AI’s default is your default, amplified. It will happily hand you the comfortable answer faster than you’d reach it yourself. The discipline has to come from you. Set the rules before you start and make the AI hold you to them.

Second, use it as a widener, not an answer machine. Its best contribution across 19 sessions wasn’t ideas, though it produced plenty. It was noticing what my ideas systematically avoided.

Third, capture beats classification. We burned no time debating whether an idea was “really” PR or an event. Tag it, move on. Taxonomy arguments are procrastination wearing a serious face.

What’s next

Ranking. The book says to sort all 19 channels into three rings. Inner ring: the three most promising. Middle: the maybes. Outer: the long shots. Then run cheap tests on the inner three. Not to pick three winners. To find the one channel that moves the needle, and pour everything into it. That’s the bullseye.

I’m ranking in a separate sitting. Deliberately. Scoring straight after brainstorming is a food shop on an empty stomach. You only return with “instant reward” items.

I’ll write up what the ranking picks and what the tests look like, next time.

Then? Get busy testing, or get busy dying.

The template

The blank workbook is free to download. Four sheets: the method, the 19 channels with sharpened definitions, a capture grid built for volume. And a prompt for your AI assistant of choice. No email required.

Download the Bullseye brainstorm workbook

Credit where it belongs: the framework is from Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. Buy the book. Read it slower than your AI wants you to.

Vennio is the demand-side scheduling API. If you’re building booking into an app or marketplace, the docs are at docs.vennio.app.