Zway.ai
Book a demo

Free tool

Which two channels, and what to ignore

Six questions about your buyer, deal size, stage, team, and whether the founder will be visible produce a short ranked list of channels with the reasoning attached. The more useful half of the output is the ignore list, because most early growth failures are caused by running too many channels badly.

Last reviewed 27 August 2026

Result

Primary channel

Reddit

/channels/reddit

Run these

Run these
RankChannelWhyRead more
1RedditReddit is where buyers describe the problem in their own words, and a good answer stays findable for years. It demands account history and patience: new accounts posting links get filtered./channels/reddit
2Hacker NewsHacker News reaches technical decision-makers at a density no other channel matches, in a single day. It is unforgiving: Show HN excludes landing pages and newsletters, and asking for votes gets accounts banned./channels/hacker-news

Deliberately ignore for now

  • Paid social. Paid amplifies a message that already converts. Without that message it buys an expensive education.
  • Influencer and UGC. Creator work assumes an audience that buys on recommendation. Your buyer runs an evaluation instead.
  • Newsletter. A newsletter needs an audience to send to. Build one somewhere else first, then own it.
  • YouTube. YouTube costs roughly a working day per video. At your team size that time buys more elsewhere.

One person can run one channel properly and one at a trickle. Anything past that is three channels done badly, which reads as no channel at all to the people you are trying to reach.

The ignore list is the point. Nothing above says these channels are bad, only that they are wrong for this combination of buyer, stage, and time. Revisit the list when one of those three changes, not when a competitor posts something that makes you nervous.

How this works

What the numbers mean.

  • 01Each answer applies a set of weights across twelve channels, and the weights are added rather than multiplied so no single answer can dominate. Ties break on a fixed order, so the same inputs always produce the same ranking.
  • 02Buyer type and founder visibility move the ranking most, because they decide whether a channel is reachable at all. Stage and team size mostly decide how many channels you can sustain, not which ones.
  • 03The bottom four are reported as the ignore list. They are not scored as bad channels, they are scored as wrong for now, and the reasoning is stated so you can disagree with it.

Assumptions and limits

  • The weights are our operating judgement from running these channels, not measured performance data. Treat the output as a structured opinion you can argue with.
  • The tool knows nothing about your product, your category, or how crowded it is. A channel that is right in principle can still be saturated in your particular niche.
  • Channel choice matters less than consistency. A middling channel run every week beats the ideal channel run for three weeks and abandoned.

Questions about this tool

Why only two or three channels?
Because every channel has a fixed weekly cost before it returns anything, and the cost does not shrink when you add another. Two channels run properly compound. Five channels run occasionally produce five dead accounts, and the dead account is worse than no account because it signals abandonment to anyone who checks.
What if the founder genuinely will not post publicly?
Then the ranking routes around it, which is exactly what it does when you select no. Search, AI search, and paid work without a named human out front. You lose the channels where trust transfers through a person, and that is a real cost, but pretending otherwise produces a plan nobody executes.
Should I trust this over my own read of the market?
No. If you have direct evidence that customers come from somewhere, that evidence outranks any scoring model, including this one. Use the output as a check on your instinct, particularly on the ignore list, where founders are most likely to be spreading themselves thin.
When should I add a third or fourth channel?
When the first one is repeatable, meaning you can predict roughly what next month produces without changing anything. Adding channels before that point multiplies the number of things that are half working, and makes it impossible to tell which one is responsible for anything.

Related

This tool is free and there is nothing to sign up for. If you would rather have the work done than calculate it, that is what Zway does.

All toolsBook a demo