New Channels or Optimized Channels

When I walk into a new startup—or even a later-stage business—I tend to hear the same concern.

“We need to figure out how to get more at-bats for our sales team.”

That sentence is usually followed by another.

“We’re already running nine channels, but we need help adding more.”

I’ve never seen a company run nine channels effectively. I’ve heard this at $3M ARR businesses and at $100M ARR businesses. The scale changes, but the thinking doesn’t.

The assumption underneath both statements is the same: growth is a function of exposure. If you put yourself in enough places, customers will eventually find you. It’s an idea that feels intuitive, and it’s been around for a long time. If you had a storefront on Main Street, more foot traffic meant more sales.

Modern marketing still borrows heavily from that mental model.

But most channels don’t work like storefronts. Running PPC doesn’t mean you get leads. Leads don’t mean you get demos. And demos don’t mean you get customers. The only thing PPC reliably guarantees is that you’re giving Google money.

What’s interesting is that when growth slows, teams rarely question this assumption. Instead, they widen the surface area. Another channel. Another experiment. Another bet that the next one will be the one that finally works.

Adding channels feels like progress. Cutting them feels like retreat.

In practice, it’s usually the opposite.

Most teams don’t actually understand how their existing channels perform. They see activity, not causality. Spend goes up, something moves downstream, and the connection feels good enough. The harder work is tracing where things break, and why. That work is quieter. It doesn’t come with a launch plan or a new budget line.

It also forces uncomfortable questions.

Is the channel underperforming because it’s set up incorrectly? Or because what happens after the click doesn’t work very well? Is the message wrong? Is the handoff broken? Or is this simply not how your customer wants to buy?

These questions are harder to answer than “What else should we try?”

I’ve seen teams spend months looking for another bucket while ignoring the leaks in the one they already have. Not because fixing leaks is expensive, but because it requires admitting that something foundational isn’t working. Adding a new channel preserves optimism. Fixing an old one requires clarity.

Sometimes the answer really is that a channel doesn’t fit. Trying to sell cybersecurity software through Facebook ads often isn’t a messaging problem. It’s a reality problem. And that’s okay. Not every channel needs to be made to work.

The mistake is treating all channels as additive by default.

The best teams I’ve worked with do the opposite. They cut aggressively. They simplify. They get brutally honest about what’s working and what isn’t. Only after they’ve wrung real understanding out of their winners do they earn the right to add something new.

Growth doesn’t stall because companies lack channels. It stalls because they mistake motion for progress.

More isn’t better. Better is better.

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