Bullseye framework by Gabriel Weinberg Part 2 - How do you decide which traction channel to focus on?

Or more broadly what to work on? Define your traction goal and critical Path to guide you.

Given all the different opportunities/product or service revisions/tasks pulling you in a lot of different directions.
Always should have an explicit traction goal you're working toward, e.g., one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers, or 10 percent of your market.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear quantitative and time-based traction subgoals, such as reaching one thousand customers by next quarter or hitting 20 percent monthly growth targets. Clear subgoals provide accountability.

The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path;
You should literally enumerate the intermediate steps (milestones) to get your traction goal;
These milestones need not be traction related, but they should be absolutely necessary to reach your goal;
- Milestones could be:
  - Hiring these people;
  - Adding features A, B and C to your product;
  - Engaging in marketing activities X, Y, Z.
- DuckDuckGo as an example:
  - Intial traction goal was to get to 100 million searches a month. The team believed the milestones they needed to hit included a faster site, a more compellig mobile offering, and more broadcast TV coverage (from publicity traction channel). Some product features like images and auto-suggest were continually requested, they believed they were not absolutely necessary milstones in their Critical Path to reach that traction goal;
  - But when the traction goal changed to 1 percent of the overall search market, those features are needed because now they had to get new users and those new users won't be that forgiving;
- The milestones will be different for you. The point is to be critical and strategic in deciding what to include. That's why it's called the Critical Path.
Be critical to your milestones:
- Stay on the critical path: limited resources hence can't afford to waste;
- Reevaluating the critical path: some milestones might no longer needed as you've finished a milestone.

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