We’ve just looked closely at some of the most critical Foundational Five pairings. Now let’s step back.

Back in the Model–Channel Fit lesson, we said that this pairing can do a lot of the heavy lifting in filtering out what’s even viable for your channel foundation. Just as Product-Channel Fit does. 

But if we zoom out further, defining your channel foundation—and aligning it with the rest of your foundations—is exactly what most of you are here to do.

You came into this program to find a way to repeatedly, predictably, and scalably acquire customers. The channel foundation is how we make that possible. It’s exactly why we’re using this framework to begin with.

But as you’ve learned, it’s not enough to have a strong channel on its own. It has to work in alignment with the rest of the foundation.

And that brings us to an exciting concept: the Foundational Five not only sets you up to define your channel foundation, it can also be used to build a more granular acquisition and channel-level strategy.

How? Because you’re not limited to looking at just pairings of the foundation.

You can layer in trios, or even sets of four. And you can combine them with other parts of your growth system to make tactical decisions at a very detailed level.

Let’s see how that works in practice. Specifically, how layering multiple foundations—and your guardrails—can help you identify not only a viable channel foundation, but also the specific channels within that category.

Here's how the layered filtering works:

• ‍Layer 1: Model-Channel Fit helps us filter by unit economic viability. We eliminate entire channel categories that don't align with our ARPU and target CAC.
• ‍Layer 2: Product-Channel Fit rules out channels that don’t align with the DNA of your product—including complexity (and friction as a whole), as well as technical compatibility.
• ‍Layer 3: Market-Channel Fit helps us understand, within the viable channel category, where our audience actually spends time. We can filter out specific channels depending on where we can or cannot reach our target market.
• ‍Layer 4: Guardrails takes us even deeper. We can layer on the guardrail component of our system—you’ll get into this in Part 3—to get more granular about exactly which channels are viable based on our current goals and the constraints we're working within. For example, while you may have aggressive long-term company goals, if your primary short-term constraint is time—meaning you must produce certain results within a short timeframe—we can layer that on top of this framework to filter out channels that have a longer time-to-result.

Now we’re seeing how practical this framework really is. And this is just one application.

While its primary purpose—helping us design our growth foundation—is critical. It’s also a decision-making tool that connects your foundation directly to real-world strategy and tactics.

Now, let’s turn concepts into action. In the next lesson, you’ll start assessing your own foundations.