Two channels.
Not twenty.
Channel paralysis is the most expensive habit in early marketing: Monday it's SEO, Wednesday it's ads, Friday it's TikTok, and nothing gets tested long enough to produce an answer.
Before you judge them
How to choose marketing channels
Every channel works for someone. Almost none work for everyone. The three things that actually decide it: where your buyer already looks when they have the problem, how long you can survive before it pays back, and whether you can stand doing it weekly.
The rule that saves the most time
Test two channels, not five, and give each one a fixed window with a number attached before you start. Most channels are abandoned in week three - before any of them could possibly have produced a signal - and then re-tried six months later from scratch. A channel you quit at week three is a channel you paid for and never read the result of.
Slow channels versus fast channels
Search and content compound but take months; communities and direct outreach produce answers this week but don't scale on their own. You want one of each: something that pays you back later, and something that tells you today whether anyone wants this at all. Running only slow channels means flying blind for a quarter. Running only fast ones means starting from zero every single morning.
The 2026 wrinkle
"Search" now means two things. Classic ranking still matters, but a growing share of buyers ask an AI model for a recommendation and never see a results page. Those are different optimisation jobs - and the second one is far less crowded, which is exactly why it's worth being early to. See the receipts for what it looks like on live sites.