The Channel Problem Gets Harder, Not Easier
Weinberg and Mares argue that most founders ignore distribution or assume the product will sell itself. That was a costly mistake when building was slow. Now that agents can prototype in hours, every competitor faces the same cheap supply of software, and the nineteen channels the book catalogs are the real competitive surface. The founder who tests channels the way engineers test code — cheaply, in parallel, fast — finds signal before the runway runs out.
Fifty Percent on Distribution Is a Design Constraint
Traction's central rule is to spend half of all effort on getting customers, not building features. For an AI-native company this is an architectural decision, not a quarterly goal. If agents handle execution, the founder's calendar should be filled with the work agents cannot do: cold conversations, unscalable onboarding, and direct sales. Founder-led sales is not a phase to survive; it is where the feedback data for every downstream workflow originates.
Judgment Is the Channel No Agent Holds
The Bullseye method asks founders to pick one channel and go deep once early tests reveal a winner. That act of choosing — pruning nineteen options to one — is a judgment call that requires lived context, domain credibility, and accountability. Agents can run experiments and surface metrics, but the human founder owns the tradeoff between a channel that scales and one that builds the right kind of trust with the right customers.
