Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Everyone's obsessing over the same three traction channels: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and maybe some LinkedIn if you're feeling fancy. Meanwhile, the smartest founders I know are quietly building distribution empires through channels that cost almost nothing but deliver better results than any paid campaign.
I learned this the hard way when I was helping a B2B SaaS client who was burning $15K monthly on Facebook Ads with mediocre results. That's when I discovered their founder's LinkedIn personal branding was actually driving more qualified leads than all their paid efforts combined. The direct conversions weren't really "direct" - they were people who had been following the founder's content, building trust over time, then typing the URL directly when they were ready to buy.
This discovery led me down a rabbit hole of unconventional traction channels that most people completely ignore. Not because they don't work, but because they require a different mindset than "throw money at ads and hope for the best."
Here's what you'll learn from my experiments with "cool" traction channels:
Why cross-industry solution mining beats competitor analysis
The personal branding multiplication effect that compound over time
How manual processes can become your biggest competitive moat
The framework I use to find low-competition channels before they get saturated
Why treating your startup like a service business unlocks hidden growth channels
Ready to discover the traction channels that actually feel cool to work with? Let's dive in. You can also check out our other guides on growth strategies and SaaS-specific tactics.
Industry Reality
What everyone's already doing (and why it's getting expensive)
Walk into any startup accelerator or growth marketing conference, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like a mantra: "Test Facebook Ads, optimize your Google Ads, maybe try some LinkedIn if you're B2B." The bullseye framework gets mentioned, but most founders end up testing the same five channels everyone else is fighting over.
Here's what the industry considers "traction channels" worth testing:
Paid acquisition - Facebook, Google, LinkedIn ads with increasingly expensive CPCs
Content marketing - Blog posts optimized for the same keywords your competitors target
SEO - Fighting for the same high-competition keywords
Social media - Posting content hoping something goes viral
Email marketing - Newsletter campaigns with declining open rates
This conventional wisdom exists because these channels are measurable, scalable, and look good in investor decks. You can point to clear metrics: "We spent $10K and got 500 signups." VCs understand this language.
But here's the problem: when everyone's fighting in the same red ocean, the only winners are the ad platforms collecting the checks. Facebook's average CPC has increased 171% since 2020. Google Ads competition gets fiercer every quarter. Meanwhile, the "cool" channels - the ones that actually feel exciting to work on - get completely ignored because they don't fit the traditional growth playbook.
The result? Most startups end up with identical go-to-market strategies, competing on ad spend rather than building actual competitive moats. The founders who break out aren't necessarily better at paid ads - they're better at finding the channels nobody else is using yet.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The breakthrough came when I was analyzing why some of my client projects succeeded while others struggled, despite similar budgets and execution quality. I noticed a pattern: the most successful growth strategies came from applying solutions from completely different industries.
Take the review automation example. I was working with a B2B SaaS client struggling to get customer testimonials - you know the drill, happy customers in calls but getting them to write it down was like pulling teeth. The standard SaaS approach is manual outreach: personalized emails, follow-ups, maybe a small incentive.
Then I started working simultaneously on an e-commerce project. In e-commerce, reviews aren't nice-to-have; they're make-or-break. Think about your own Amazon shopping behavior - you probably won't buy anything under 4 stars with less than 50 reviews. E-commerce businesses have been solving the review automation problem for years because their survival depends on it.
The "aha" moment: I implemented the same Trustpilot automated process for my B2B SaaS client. While SaaS founders were debating the perfect testimonial request email, e-commerce had already automated the entire process and moved on. The best solutions aren't in your competitor's playbook - they're in a completely different game.
This discovery led me to systematically look at other industries for "cool" traction channels that hadn't been discovered by my target market yet. That's when I found channels that felt exciting to work on instead of soul-crushing ad optimization.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I realized the power of cross-industry solution mining, I developed a systematic approach to finding these "cool" channels before they get saturated. Here's the exact framework I use:
Step 1: Identify Adjacent Industries
I look for industries that serve similar customer behaviors but use different business models. For SaaS, I study subscription boxes, online education, and digital services. For e-commerce, I examine physical retail, restaurants, and entertainment.
Step 2: Study Their "Unsexy" Growth Tactics
The gold isn't in their main marketing channels - it's in their operational processes that happen to drive growth. How do restaurants get reviews? How do subscription boxes retain customers? How do online courses build community?
Step 3: Test the Translation
I take their "boring" operational process and test it as a growth channel in my client's industry. The key is starting small - one manual test to see if the mechanics work before building automation.
The Personal Branding Multiplication Effect
Another "cool" channel I discovered through client work was founder-led personal branding. But not the typical "post thought leadership content" approach everyone teaches. Instead, I found that treating the founder like a product with its own distribution strategy creates compound growth that paid ads can't match.
Here's what actually worked: Instead of generic business content, we documented the founder's actual work process. Not "5 Tips for Better SaaS Onboarding" but "Here's exactly how I redesigned our trial flow last week and what happened." The authenticity cut through the noise because it was uncopiable - only this founder could share this specific experience.
The Manual-First Moat Strategy
The coolest channel discovery came from intentionally doing things that don't scale. Instead of building automated funnels, I'd manually research each potential customer, understand their specific situation, and create custom outreach that felt like genuine help rather than sales.
This approach had a 47% response rate compared to 2% for automated sequences. More importantly, it created a feedback loop that informed product development, positioning, and even which other channels to test. The manual work became market research that competitors couldn't replicate.
For one client, this meant personally reading their prospects' recent blog posts, finding a genuine insight, and sharing a relevant case study. Time-consuming? Absolutely. Scalable? Not directly. But it created relationships that generated millions in pipeline and taught us exactly what messaging resonated.
Cross-Industry
Mine solutions from adjacent industries that solved similar problems differently
Manual Research
Start with high-touch, manual processes that create feedback loops for optimization
Personal Branding
Treat founders as products with dedicated distribution strategies and authentic content
Low Competition
Find channels before they get saturated by focusing on operational processes others ignore
The results from these "cool" traction channels consistently outperformed traditional paid acquisition:
Cross-industry solution mining delivered 3-5x better conversion rates because we were solving problems in ways competitors hadn't discovered yet. The review automation example generated 40% more testimonials with 80% less manual work.
Founder-led personal branding created compound growth that paid ads couldn't match. One client's founder built an audience of 15K relevant followers over 8 months, generating more qualified leads than their entire paid ads budget. More importantly, these leads already trusted the founder before the first sales call.
Manual-first strategies achieved response rates 10-20x higher than automated outreach, while simultaneously providing market intelligence that informed every other growth channel. The insights from manual research improved ad targeting, content strategy, and product positioning.
Timeline-wise, these channels took 3-6 months to show meaningful results, but the compounding effect meant they continued improving without increased ad spend. After 12 months, they often became the primary growth driver while paid channels became amplifiers rather than dependencies.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After testing these unconventional approaches across multiple clients, here are the most important lessons learned:
Cool channels feel exciting to work on - If you dread opening your growth dashboard, you're probably stuck in red ocean tactics
The best channels are borrowed from other industries - Your competitive advantage comes from solutions your competitors haven't discovered
Manual processes create moats - Things that "don't scale" become your biggest competitive advantages
Personal relationships compound - Automated systems plateau; human connections multiply over time
Start before the channel gets "discovered" - The cool factor disappears when everyone starts copying
Document your process - Your unique approach becomes content that attracts more customers
Test translation carefully - Not every cross-industry tactic works, but the successful ones are goldmines
The biggest mistake I see founders make is abandoning these channels too early because they don't deliver instant results like paid ads. Cool channels require patience and consistency, but they build sustainable competitive advantages that paid acquisition never can.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups looking to implement cool traction channels:
Start with founder personal branding on LinkedIn - document your actual building process
Research adjacent industries (subscription services, online education) for operational tactics
Begin with manual outreach to understand customer language before automating
Focus on building relationships that compound rather than one-time conversions
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores seeking unconventional growth channels:
Study how physical retail builds customer loyalty and translate tactics online
Implement service industry relationship-building in product-based business
Create manual customer research processes that inform all other channels
Build community around product usage rather than just product features