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Layer 3: Engine

See the system index for how this layer fits the whole system.

Purpose

Describe how a stranger becomes a tenant, name the single channel we commit to, and hold the creative that runs in it. This is the working machinery of acquisition.

Research lineage

  • Brian Balfour, Four Fits. Products are built to fit channels, so the motion and the channel choice follow from the Product-Channel fit in Layer 1.
  • First Round Review, Pick the Right Lane. You generally only need to excel at one lane to build a successful business, but it will not be easy. The common failure is investing in too many channels at once and not funding any one of them enough. Commit means dedicating real resources and bending the product and experience toward the lane.

What plugs in here

  • Acquisition motion: customer-journey.md and the journey diagrams in diagrams/.
  • The committed lane and channel strategy: channels.md.
  • Channels and creative: paid-meta.md, creative-log.md, mms2026.md, and the marketing skills (copywriting, ad-creative, paid-ads, content-strategy).

The motion (to be written as stages)

The path from stranger to tenant should be written as explicit stages, each with its own conversion question:

  • Stranger to inquiry (the channel does this work).
  • Inquiry to visit (the on-ramp: a tour, or a free session using the 50 prepaid credits).
  • Visit to move-in (the closer: the community manager, for example Matador in Salem, who closes roughly 80% of tours).
  • The parallel second act: referral and community, built alongside but not relied on to fill the first building.

The lane decision (made, 2026-06-23)

Recorded in channels.md: high-intent search (Google, paid and organic) is the committed primary, funded first; Meta is secondary on a leads or conversions objective (never a traffic objective); local presence, organic, and referral/community are support and second act. The reasoning is Product-Channel fit (a toured, high-consideration product suits high-intent capture) confirmed by the Salem evidence (February search produced the only real move-in batch; cutting it while quadrupling low-intent Meta traffic took move-ins to zero).

One sub-debate stays open inside the lane: Google's reliable, lower-volume conversions versus Meta's high volume of cheap instant-form leads. Google converts more dependably; Meta produces many cheap leads whose conversion we cannot yet see. Settling it needs the Layer 4 attribution gap closed so Meta leads can be traced to move-ins. Until then Meta runs secondary on a leads objective and is judged on move-ins, not lead count.

Gaps and next steps

  • Done (2026-06-23): the committed lane call is made and recorded in channels.md; the three docs that pointed to a forthcoming channels.md (../1-foundation/positioning.md, ../2-growth-model/guardrails.md, ../1-foundation/glossary.md) now resolve.
  • Next: reconcile paid-meta.md (known stale creative and campaign info) to current reality and fold its strategy into channels.md.
  • Write the motion as named stages with a conversion question at each step.
  • mms2026.md is now a past campaign (the festival was 2026-06-21); mark it archived rather than live.