Learnings from Product-Channel Fit
Image credit Brian Balfour
Product/Channel fit gets a lot less attention than the ubiquitous Product/Market fit — but is still important to pay attention to.
I spent the last few months working with a B2B fashion-tech startup focused on circularity, restarting marketing that had gone dormant. No one owned it internally at the time, and with commercial traction picking up, it became a key focus.
Three months in, we pulled the engagement data. People in retail and fashion were engaging at almost five times their share of the overall audience. The content wasn't just reaching people. It was reaching the right people, and they were paying attention. For this client, that meant retail professionals and executives.
Here are some of the insights that came out of this project:
Your voice and your company's voice aren't the same channel.
The founder’s personal posts — the ones where she was actually working through something out loud, not promoting anything — beat anything more polished or branded, by a wide margin. The company page earned attention for a completely different reason: it was useful. Invitations, recaps, real examples of the problem the company solves and retail audits. Some companies make the mistake of running the same playbook on both. This quarter made it pretty clear that's the wrong move — one channel builds trust through personality, the other builds it through utility.
Small and steady beats big and occasional.
The clearest lesson on the secondary channel wasn't about doing more — it was about not stopping. During one stretch where a certain content format dropped to zero was also the stretch where overall reach dropped the hardest. It didn’t take much to keep the channel healthy. It just couldn't go dark.
A quiet senior audience isn't a "no."
Senior titles were overrepresented among followers but underrepresented among people actually engaging. That's not the content failing — it's a sign that audience needs a more direct ask before they'll raise a hand publicly. Founders read that silence as disinterest all the time. Usually it's just a different bar for engaging in public.
What I'd tell any founder running lean marketing
You don't always need more channels. You do need to stop running one playbook across all of them. Figure out which channel is selling what, and build for each accordingly. Post to your secondary channel often enough that it never goes dark, because the audience you neglect is the one that forgets you. Be aware who's engaging versus who's just watching. And put a tracking link on everything, so you're making decisions on data instead of hunches.
None of this costs more budget. It costs attention. Channel/market fit isn't something you find once and lock in; it shifts as platforms change and audiences move. The founders who win on a lean budget aren't the ones on the most channels. They're the ones paying closest attention to the channels they're already on.
