How do I know if a channel is actually working or I'm just fooling myself?
The short answer
A channel is working when you can spend a rupee (or an hour) on one end and reliably get a paying customer out the other, and you can do it again next week. Vanity signals like impressions, likes, and signups that never convert are the main way founders fool themselves. Set one honest metric per channel before you start, usually cost per paying customer or replies-to-conversions, and be willing to call a channel dead if it does not move that number in your test window.
Go deeper, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
Andrew Chen ran growth at Uber and a16z, and his core idea here, the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, is exactly why a channel that looked like it was working quietly stops. He pushes you past the big channels everyone claims are working toward the smaller ones that actually move real users before you have scale. It reframes the question from is this channel popular to is this channel still working for me, which is the honest version.
Why we picked it
The book behind the "One Metric That Matters" discipline, which is exactly the mindset you need to judge whether a ship worked instead of drowning in vanity numbers. It ties the right metric to your business type and stage, so you know which signal to watch after a launch. Read it as the reference that makes the rest of this list make sense.
Why we picked it
If you just want to know how many people showed up and how long they stayed, without slowing your page or bolting on a cookie banner, this is a clean option. The script is tiny (around 45 times smaller than Google Analytics), so your landing page stays fast, which itself lowers bounces. Because it does not use cookies or collect personal data, you skip the consent popup that scares visitors off.
