At different stages of a startup's journey, the marketing team will have different priorities. At a certain point, the priority will have to be user / customer acquisition.

When it comes to user acquisition, you cannot get rid of the discussion around different marketing channels. Which channels to try? Which channels to scale up? Which channels to abandon?

Here is a simple framework to quickly get to channel <> product fit:

You start by planning which channels to test out. This often stems from the team and founder's past experience on which channels should bring the quickest and easiest success. It is subjective and has a bit of path dependence.

When doing channel planning, you can pick the top channels to go after and prioritise from there. But everything you do should be built on top of a analytics and testing framework. Here is an example:

From there, you build tests and mini campaigns that, with the help of your analytics and reporting, tell you which channels are getting positive ROI and deserve scaling up. You will also get to know which channels are not working and should be abandoned for that time period.

This framework should be enough to kickstart your customer acquisition flywheel.