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May 31 - August 24, 2023
Traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup.
Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.
it helps you build the right product because you can incorporate knowledge from your traction efforts.
These interactions also get you additional data, like what messaging is resonating with potential customers, what niche you might focus on first, what types of customers will be easiest to acquire, and what major distribution roadblocks you might run into.
The second key benefit to parallel product and traction development is that you get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything.
Before you can set about getting traction, you have to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal.
How many customers do you need and at what growth rate?
Your traction strategy should always be focused on moving the needle for your traction goal.
Startup growth happens in spurts. Initially, growth is usually slow. Then it spikes as a useful traction channel strategy is unlocked. Eventually it flattens out again as this strategy gets saturated and becomes less effective. Then you unlock another strategy and you get another spike.
Put half your efforts into getting traction.
Set your growth goals.
Learn what growth numbers potential investors respect.
Find your bright spots.
Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel.
For each channel, you should identify one decent channel strategy that has a chance of moving the needle.
The second step in Bullseye is running cheap traction tests in the channels that seem most promising.
You can run multiple experiments at the same time because tests take some time to run after they’ve been set up.
For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to determine if the idea really is good or not. These tests should be designed to roughly answer the following three questions:
How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel? How many customers are available through this channel? Are the customers that you are getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?
Keep in mind that, when testing, you are not trying to get a lot of traction with a channel just yet.
The third and final step in Bullseye is to focus solely on the channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel.
At any stage in a startup’s life cycle, one traction channel dominates in terms of customer acquisition.
Work through Bullseye.
Talk to founders a few steps ahead of you.
Hold on to your other channel ideas.
your tests should be designed to answer these questions: How much does it cost to acquire each customer through this channel strategy? How many customers are available through this channel strategy? Are the customers you are getting through this channel the ones you want right now?
INNER RING TESTS Inner ring tests are designed to do two things. First, to optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be. Second, to uncover better channel strategies within this traction channel.
Making A/B testing a habit (even if you run just one test a week) will improve your efficiency in a traction channel by two or three times.
Tactics that once worked well will become crowded and ineffective.
It is likely that your first channel strategy ideas are commonplace and have already succumbed somewhat to the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs. To combat this reality you should consistently brainstorm new channel strategies and conduct small experiments.
An untapped channel strategy may mean trying something different in an established venue, but it also could mean trying a venue no one else is using.
The faster you run high-quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.
basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you answer all three of these questions.
We recommend using a spreadsheet to help you rank and prioritize your traction channel strategies.
At a minimum, include the columns of how many customers are available, conversion rate, cost to acquire a customer, and lifetime value of a customer for a given strategy.
In general, we encourage you to be as quantitative as possible, even if it is just guesstimating at first.
Look for customers where others aren’t looking. Keep a lookout for the cutting-edge tactics that haven’t yet succumbed to the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs.
Constantly optimize. You should consistently run A/B tests in your efforts to optimize a traction channel strategy.
Keep it numerical. Look for ways to quantify your marketing efforts, especially when deciding which traction strategies to pursue and comparing them within Bullseye.
You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working toward. This could be one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers, or 10 percent of your market.
The importance of choosing the right traction goal cannot be overstated. Are you going for growth or profitability, or something in between?
By placing traction activities on the same calendar as product development and other company milestones, you ensure that enough of your time will be spent on traction.
The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path. You should literally enumerate the intermediate steps (milestones) to get to your traction goal. These milestones need not be traction related, but they should be absolutely necessary to reach your goal.
Critical Path is a framework to help you decide what not to do.
Lay out your milestones. Determine your traction goal and define your Critical Path against that goal, working backward and enumerating the absolutely necessary milestones you need to achieve to get there.
Stay on the Critical Path. Assess every activity you do against your Critical Path and consistently reassess it.
Actively work to overcome your traction channel biases. Being on the cutting edge of the right traction channel can make a huge difference in success.
Targeting blogs prospective customers read is one of the most effective ways to get your first wave of customers.
