DistroFit

The 19 channels

Publicity / PR

Press coverage. An event, not a channel.

What it is

Traditional media coverage, one of the 19 traction channels. S3 Getting press appears in both of Lenny Rachitsky’s cold-start studies: Superhuman, Product Hunt, Airbnb, Slack and Instagram on the consumer side, and Canva and Twilio on the B2B side, where Canva’s stealth-launch coverage generated a 50,000-person waitlist and Twilio launched via TechCrunch in 2008. S18 S19

When it works

At a launch or a genuine milestone, when there is a story a journalist can tell. It is one of the manual, unscalable things that produced first customers in the documented cases, and almost none of those strategies were scalable channels. S19

What it needs from the product

A story, and somewhere for the attention to land. Press that arrives on a site with no email capture leaves nothing behind. S22

How it decays

Andrew Chen lists PR among the mature channels he finds degraded, each for a specific reason. S25 Every channel decays. Novelty fades, competitors copy what works, and scaling means reaching progressively less responsive people. S21

What the report checks

No structural gate and no spend floor. The report marks it open and adds a note: plan for one hit, not a pipeline.

Sources

  1. S3 Growth Method, "19 traction channels for growth marketers" secondary source
  2. S18 Lenny Rachitsky, "How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users"
  3. S19 Lenny Rachitsky, "How today’s fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers"
  4. S22 Stripe, "Platform risk: how to identify it, assess it, and build a more resilient business"
  5. S25 Andrew Chen, "Every marketing channel sucks right now"
  6. S21 Andrew Chen, "The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs"