I Built a Cheap Channel Finder for Any Market
The rank is computed by code from a rubric — not guessed.
Somewhere there's a post that says there are only twelve real marketing channels.
I don't even remember where I saw it. But it stuck, because it can't be true. Twelve might be the menu. They are not the answer for any one buyer. So I sat down and built a tool to find the real answer — for any market — and recorded the whole thing.
The premise: point it at a market — lawyers, home services, dentists — and it hands back a ranked list of the best ways in. Not the twelve we all know. The specific channels where those buyers actually pay attention, what each costs, why it's the bet, and how to test it cheap.
Most channel advice starts from the channel. Meta, LinkedIn, SEO, a conference — pick one, go. That's backwards. You should start from your channel experiments of the past and market exploration of ways to reach your buyer.
Build the picture in concentric circles
The first thing I told it: don't start from the channel. Start from the buyer, and work in concentric circles.
Innermost — world knowledge. Before anything, go learn the buyer. If it's lawyers: where do they gather, which associations run their world, what do they have to do every year to keep their license. That grounds everything after it.
Outward — market wisdom. Someone has already tried to sell to these people. Find the case studies. Find the marketers who target this exact buyer and read what they did. There's wisdom in markets — if every competitor sponsors the same conference, that conference matters.
The other direction entirely — the buyer's own voice. Work backwards from what real buyers have said: where they first heard about a vendor, the words they use. I've mined recorded sales calls for exactly this before; it's some of the best signal there is, and almost nobody does it.
Three ways of looking at the same market, each strongest at a different job — and I had them argue with each other.
The part I couldn't stop thinking about: where are they forced to be?
While I was building this, I dropped the same question into ChatGPT and Claude and used them as sparring partners. I do this constantly — it's a cheap way to surface the thing you didn't think to ask.
And one of them said it. Internet data misses the channels that matter most — local reputation, referrals between attorneys, the places lawyers are required to show up.
That's when it clicked, on camera. Lawyers have to earn continuing-education credits every year. They pay dues to a state bar. They file through systems they can't opt out of. Nobody lists "continuing education" as a marketing channel. But every single lawyer has to be there.
So I made it a principle, not a legal trick: for any buyer, where are they legally or ethically compelled to show up? When your buyer is required to be in a room, that room is the best channel you've never bought. That's the alpha — underpriced, high-trust, and everyone else is looking past it.
Wide first, then deep
Here's the order I made it run.
First, breadth. There are maybe ten to fifty channels you should always evaluate — paid search, Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, email, partnerships, associations, podcasts, newsletters, conferences, the lot. Pull them all, judge nothing yet. Then a second, smarter pass that hunts for the channels the checklist would never name — driven by questions about your specific buyer: where are they compelled to be, who do they trust, where do they go looking when something breaks.
Only then does it go deep — pressure-test the contenders, find the real audience size, the real cost, the real contact, and cut the long tail.
Most people skip the wide pass. They optimize the one channel they already picked. That's how you miss the cheap attention nobody else has found.
How it actually runs
Under the hood it's a swarm of Claude agents at once. One group studies how other people have solved channel discovery — before it ever looks at my own tools, so it isn't anchored on what I already have. Another group argues about how to build the buyer picture. Then one agent per channel, each hunting for hard proof: is this really where these buyers gather and trust? A second set of agents checks that work, a verifier signs off, and only the conclusions come back to the main agent — so it never drowns in detail.
And the score is not the AI's opinion. Each agent gathers the evidence; code turns it into the rank, from a fixed scorecard of eight things — how tightly the buyer clusters there, whether real buyers say that's how they found you, whether customers from that channel actually stick around, how contested it already is. Same evidence in, same number out, every time. It can't drift on a mood. It also won't trust a link until an agent has opened the page — the real group with its member count, the real sponsor page — not a homepage that looks right.
The real test: make it rediscover what I already knew
Here's the rule I set, don't bake in the legal answers. Bake in the thinking — "where are they compelled to be," "who do they trust" — then run it on lawyers and see if it finds the answers on its own. If it doesn't, the principle is wrong, not the lawyer.
So I ran it twice. Once knowing what I knew. And once cold — a blind pass with the buyer profile stripped of every answer I'd fed it.
It found them. On the cold pass it named the state bar, mandatory continuing education, the practice-management software lawyers live in, and the peer groups where they actually talk — on its own. The compelled-channel idea I'd only just had on camera, it rediscovered from first principles.
All in, it scored 330 channels and ranked them. 31 came back genuinely underpriced. 27 were openings the business wasn't using at all.
None of it came clean on the first run. Running too many of the heavy checking agents at once kept tripping a rate limit, so I throttled them. The first links it handed back looked right and were wrong — a "real" Facebook group that was the wrong group, a subreddit that resolved to a dating board — so I made it open the page and prove the link before trusting it. And it kept giving me bare names: a person, no title, no reason to believe them. Useless. So I made it find the actual role, a real contact, and a Monday-morning next step for every channel. A ranking isn't a deliverable until every line is something you can do.
Lawyers were just the guinea pig. Next I point it at a market that has nothing to do with law. If it holds up there, it graduates.
— Written by Claude Opus 4.8, Approved by Jordan
The whole build is below — about 26 minutes of me thinking out loud, using two AI models as sparring partners, and shaping the plan in plain English. Then the part every channel guide skips: exactly how the tool scores a channel, the eight tests it runs on each, and how to install it and point it at your own market.
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