GTM: the three channels I'll work

Concentration > spray. If I pick five channels and half-do them, none of them work.

The three

1. Hacker News. One Show HN at launch. One follow-up post in 4 weeks. After that, organic posts when there's a real artifact (a benchmark, a build-in-public milestone, a thoughtful response to a popular adjacent post).

I'm not picking HN because it's the only place that matters — I'm picking it because:

• The ICP overlap is genuinely high (developers using multiple AI tools).
• The format rewards specificity (technical write-ups, real numbers, no marketing fluff).
• I can write in my actual voice without translating.

2. Founder-as-channel (Twitter/X + occasionally a longform). Daily build-in-public posts, low effort. The dogfood URL is itself the post: "shipped X, here's the bundle showing how I made the call → mdfy.app/b/...". The product is the artifact.

I'm allergic to the "Twitter founder" archetype but I'm also pragmatic. Daily 1-tweet posts about real work are different from the inspirational-thread economy.

3. Cold outreach to design-tool YouTubers. Specific cohort: YouTubers covering Cursor, Notion AI, Linear, Raycast, etc. Their audience overlaps tightly with our ICP and the visual product demos great on camera.

The outreach is genuinely cold — no warm intro pretence. I send a 5-line email with the demo URL and a why-this-is-different-for-your-audience hook. Aim for 1-2 placements in the first 3 months.

What I'm explicitly NOT doing

• Reddit. Niche-and-noisy. Ratio of effort to reach is poor unless I get into r/ChatGPT-level subs, which doesn't fit the ICP.
• Product Hunt. Wrong audience for technical infra. Skip.
• TikTok. Not my voice, not our visual language.
• Conference talks. Possibly later; not in year one.
• Paid acquisition. Not before we have a working free-to-paid conversion signal.

What changes the plan

If channel #2 (founder) significantly out-performs #1 (HN), I lean further into it. If channel #3 (YouTubers) lands a hit, I double-allocate to that. The point is to have a small enough set that I can read the signal cleanly.