What do you think of the 19 channels to gain traction?

These are all still very relevant if you ask me. Indie hackers, in particular, might not benefit from display ads for example (due to all the costs) but consistent content marketing, email, and blogging get you pretty far over time. One channel I don't see that's all the hype lately is podcasting. Courtland is living proof of how well that can scale.

I chose to blog/YouTube for the past 4 years or so. My channel grows 10+ subscribers a day on average (now up to about 6.1k subscribers) but that's not my only focus. I'd also like to get into speaking, community building, and podcasting to be more diverse and less comfortable (I mean this in the sense of self-growth).

I think the key is to choose the channels that make sense to your project/product. If you don't have a product/project or are in between those you can still "ship" things. Blogging, vlogging, podcasts are examples where you can share your knowledge/opinions.

It's a fantastic book but there's a lot of info missing that needs to be addressed before you get to channels.

None of these channels will work if you don't (1) target the right market, (2) have the right product for that market, (3) have the right model (pricing and activation model), (4) messaging and positioning. THEN channels become powerful. Until then, they'll likely be a waste.

It's also valuable to realize that not every channel is right for your customer or right for your product or right for your model. If none of your customers ever go to trade shows, why go to trade shows? If your product is a social media app, sales really isn't going to work. If your price is $10,000/month, viral marketing would likely never work for you.

I think it's very relevant and I used it a ton when freelancing as a remote growth hacker for various DNs as well as for Codementor / Arc in their early days.

One of the core insights in the book is that most founders tend to dismiss several of the growth channels and stick to what they're comfortable with. Not only that, but entire industries tend to exhibit herd-like behavior and bid up the price of using their channel(s) of choice.

The difficult thing for an indiehacker is that early on, we don't have many resources to devote to growth channels. I've found it much easier to help others from 500 to 5000 customers than to go from 0 to 50 on my own. In fact, prior to my current project, the only times I've ever done it successfully were both with brick and mortar businesses where I sold in person.

One thing that's not listed in the book but more used recently is influencers - particularly the rise of streamers / youtubers which are very effective for marketing games as far as I know.

I only read it a few months ago and found it still very valuable for a non-marketer like me. A lot of the ideas and lessons are more well-known by now, particularly if you do a lot of marketing, but it gave me clarify and ideas on channels that I haven't thought about. It's a quick read and I found it much easier to digest than Hacking Growth.

But then when it comes to implementation, we haven't been fully utilising what we've learned... I did try Engineering as Marketing (our experiment) a couple of times to satisfying results so we might do that again ;)