Where to show up, and what to do when you get there

Beacon answers where and how, per segment rather than per product, because different buyers are in different places and one channel list for a whole company is the wrong shape. Each segment gets three or four ranked channels, and each channel carries a concrete play: the format, a cadence one person can sustain, the opening angle for that specific segment, and the prerequisite that has to be true before the channel produces anything. It is biased hard toward channels a founder can work by hand with no budget.

“I know who it's for. Now where do I reach them, and what do I do on each one? I'm posting into the void.”

There is a free version of this

Plans your first three segments, ungated.

Try the channel picker, free

What you get

Artifacts, not adjectives.

Three to four ranked channels per segment, named specifically — "r/dataengineering" or "the dbt Slack", never "social media".
A play per channel: format, cadence, the opening angle for that segment, and the prerequisite to meet first.
A status you set per channel — doing this, will try, not for me — so the plan reflects reality rather than ambition.
The channel map that tells posts which platforms to write for and outreach whether email is even relevant.

What it isn't

The half that decides whether this is right for you.

Not a scheduler, a poster or an analytics dashboard. Posting is a different job.
Not a "best marketing channels for SaaS" listicle. It is per segment and grounded in your product, which is why two segments in the same account get different answers.
Not validated against your market. The ranking encodes opinionated defaults about what one person can execute — useful for deciding what to try first, not a prediction of results.

What it costs

2 credits per run, covering every segment. Reshaping the plan by chatting is free.

One shared credit pool across every job. You are only charged for work you approve — a failed generation costs nothing.

What has to happen first

Needs a segment map from Customers first. Channel advice without segments is a listicle, and the whole value here is that the answer differs per buyer.

John prepares. You approve.

Everything here arrives as a draft in your inbox with its credit cost shown before you decide. Nothing is sent, published or spent without your explicit yes, and there is no setting that changes that — it is the architecture rather than a preference. The reasoning is written up here.

Channels: common questions

Why does channel advice need my segments first?

Because a single channel list for a whole product is almost always wrong for most of its buyers. Two segments of the same product are often reachable in completely different places, and the useful output is per segment. Channel advice without segments is a generic listicle, which is already free everywhere.

Does it recommend paid ads?

Only when a segment is genuinely unreachable otherwise, and then it ranks last and the prerequisite says why. The default bias is hard toward what one person can do by hand with no budget: specific communities, founder-led posting, launch moments, direct outreach.

What is a channel prerequisite?

The thing that has to be true before the channel works at all — standing in the community before you link anything, a warmed domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC before you cold email, people ready to comment before you launch. Skipping it is the usual reason a well-chosen channel produces nothing, and it reads as the channel failing rather than the setup being absent.

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Last updated 2026-08-03