a tierlist for growth channels.

Have you heard of tier lists?

They’re very common in gaming world.

Influencers like to put together lists ranking characters, items, or selections and opine on them.

I had a quieter week as I work through a project exension and thought:

Do you know what the world needs?

A tierlist for growth channels for startups.

But not just any tierlist, but grabbing and ranking the channels from the book Traction.

Here’s the channels from the book:

• Targeting Blogs
• Publicity
• Unconventional PR
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social and Display Ads
• Offline Ads
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Engineering as Marketing
• Viral Marketing
• Business Development
• Sales
• Affiliate Programs
• Existing Platforms
• Trade Shows
• Offline Events
• Speaking Engagements
• Community Building
​

And here’s the list:

Let’s dig into them...

S tier -

Engineering as Marketing - the cool kids are now calling this GTM engineering. This is focused on building automations, workflows, sequences, and marketing collateral that leverages the full capabilities of AI and data today. This goes bananas in B2B startups - because you can find out a large amount of details about your total addressable market (TAM) and go after them directly.

Email marketing - email is boring but effective. Having a warm list of customers and potential customers ready to go gives any business an outsized advantage. In the 20+ years I’ve been doing this I’ve seen it pooh-poohed a number of times, and yet it still punches above its weight on nearly every metric that matters. Outbound email has become increasingly more accessible and popular as well and this is why it’s one of the best channels for a startup’s growth.

Community - imagine a large group of customers that buy your product repeatedly, advocate and recruit people towards your brand, and continuously deliver passionate feedback about your business direction. That’s what a great community is and why it’s one of the best channels for a startup’s growth. A great current example of this is local startup Spoony - a safe social space for neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled people to make friends and find support. It had a 50k waitlist prior to launch and the feedback’s been incredible:

You can’t do that with ads.

Sales - the most important lever a founder of an early startup can pull. All other channels are distractions if this is ignored. There’s always more to learn and it’s S tier no ifs, or buts (and I’ve heard a lot of technical founders say but).

A tier -

Speaking engagements - in the book Traction, the author talked about using conferences, expos, and events to speak as much as you can to attract an audience. This worked in 2015 - but now it can be done at pace with podcasts. It’s extraordinarily effective. Vanta is one of the fastest growing B2B startups in recent history, and podcasts were one of the channels contributing to this:

Content marketing - giving people a chance to consume before buying is the name of the game and content marketing has contributed to this trend more than anything else. What’s interesting about this in 2025 is that the rate at which you can crank out content is faster than ever - but I also believe there’s a real gap in the market ready for authentic content. You can do this with founder-led video, speaking your mind, not watering down what you say, being kind etc. the important part is to find your style and own it.

Events - one of the first things I ask B2C founders with an early product is “have you sold this at a farmer’s market?” The reason is the live feedback you get from potential customers is second-to-none. The expressions, the questions, the sales - they’re all 100X more valuable than ecommerce data. This is true for nearly every founder - be at live events and spruik, and if there isn’t an event then create one. You can capture attendee data and turn it into some early traction.

Business development - partnering with other businesses for win-wins is one of the most effective corridors for growth. When I was leading social impact at Whispir I worked these angles hard. I knew getting in front of Australia Red Cross repeatedly would help us and them and in doing so it created partnership opportunities. I’ve coached every founder I’ve worked with through these approaches and the only reason this isn’t S tier is that it requires a lot of experience and skill to “do the dance”. Part of BD is simply understanding how leaders, departments, missions, and “the game” works so you can turn it to your advantage. It’s worth it and the gains can be huge.

B tier -

SEO - it’s a weird time for search engine optimisation. LLMs are increasingly moving into search engine territory and Google/Bing haven’t worked out how to navigate this to their advantage. There’s a lot of changes going on with things being affected by changes in behaviour, swathes of generated content, and increases in video. There will always be a corridor for growing organically - but it’s time consuming and requires patience and a lot of effort to pull off effectively.

Trade shows - there’s an industry trade show for nearly every startup. One of the big challenges of these shows is generating a return on investment. It’s usually a lot of money to sponsor or host a stall. You’re in amongst a sea of adjacent businesses and competitors. There will be large companies in the same room dominating your prospect’s attention. But there’s very few channels that will have all your perfect buyer’s in one room over 1-3 days. One founder I worked with (Kitchen Language) could very predictably get great returns at trade shows that were a great fit for her audience - the challenge was finding similar shows that were the same.

C tier -

Affiliate - on paper an affiliate sounds like a great deal. I’ll pay you a % of each sale if you go and get me more sales. In practice it rarely works that well. There’s a big education piece on the value of your product, there’s much less brand safety, and there’s a lot of shady practices. Think of it as a growth extender rather than a growth deliverer.

Blogs - guest posting used to be the best thing since soy and wasabi got together, but those days are long gone. They’re no longer SEO wunderkinds, and it’s hard to guarantee it doing anything. You can still gain leverage from writing for newsletters and social media swaps, but it’s a shadow of what it once was 10 years ago.

PR - the right feature or news piece can make an early startup. It’s reaching an outsized audience compared to what they could achieve otherwise. The reason I’ve graded this low is that it’s over-focused on and fuels founder egos. A lot of startups are fixated on selling their vision and product, which is great for running a business - but terrible news for a journalist or media outlet. It takes a lot of work to spin that story into something newsworthy and there’s no guarantee your ideal audience is the same people consuming from that media outlet. You’ve been told.

Search ads - expensive, highly competitive, and hard to get a return on unless the search is for something super-specific.

Offline ads - expensive, low reach, untargeted and needs to be coordinated with more channels to be effective for a startup. Rarely a sound investment in the early stages.

Existing platforms - the “play” here is jumping on a new tool early where your audience is, and riding on the coat tails of a platform that’s growing in popularity. It’s been done with Salesforce, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok et al. The challenge in 2025 is that everyone knows this play and when a new platform emerges its full of people trying to harness this energy. The hype around clubhouse.com is a good example of this ending poorly.

D tier -

Viral marketing and stunts - the likelihood of predictably growing your early startup with viral marketing or stunts is extremely low. It requires deep knowledge of memes and how to be novel and interesting. Traits that not a lot of startups have out of the box. It can be done - Dollar Shave Club - debuted with a YT video and its product blew up. Eventually being acquired by Unilever. This is the great exception rather than the norm.

–

I had a lot of fun putting this together.

I went ahead and did a YouTube talking through the tierlist, and have scheduled shorts to pump into the algo over the next few days:

It took about 2/3 of a day to get all of this done so isn’t practical moving forward, but basically wanted to test what increased effort would look like numbers-wise.

My gut says this would need to be done consistently over time (time I don’t have) but will keep you posted.

Learn anything?

Feel free to reply and let me know as I always love chatting to readers.

-Marshy