Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

We use the name Bullseye for our three-step framework because you’re aiming for the Bullseye—the one traction channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage.

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel.

Imagine what success would

look like in each channel, and write it down in your outer ring.

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.

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?

when testing, you are not trying to get a lot of traction with a channel just yet. Instead, you are simply trying to determine if it’s a channel that could move the needle for your startup.

You should be able to get a rough idea of a channel’s effectiveness with at most a thousand dollars and a month of time.

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.

The goal of this focusing step is quite simple: to wring every bit of traction out of your core channel.

If, unfortunately, no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated.

Noah kept track of the test results in this spreadsheet:

In the early

days, the channel strategies of sponsoring mid-level bloggers in the financial niche and guest posting allowed Mint to acquire its first forty thousand customers.

Talk to founders a few steps ahead of you. Research how past and present companies in your space and adjacent spaces succeeded or failed at getting traction. The easiest way to do this is to go talk to startup founders who previously failed at what you’re trying to do.

Hold on to your other channel ideas. Compile your brainstorming ideas for each traction channel in a spreadsheet with educated guesses that you can confirm through testing.

The goal of middle ring tests is to find a promising channel strategy to focus on.

In particular, 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?

Targeting Blogs Publicity Unconventional PR Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Social and Display Ads Offline Ads Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Marketing Email Marketing Viral Marketing Engineering as Marketing Business Development (BD)

Sales Affiliate Programs Existing Platforms Trade Shows Offline Events Speaking Engagements Community Building

To test targeting blogs, he contacted a few that were representative of different customer segments and got them to write articles about Mint.

Many personal bloggers have strong readerships, but don’t make money from their writing. Noah offered them a way to show off a cool new service and make some money doing it. He simply sent them a message with “Can I send you $500?” as the subject and told them a bit about the product and what Mint was trying to do. Most were happy to share a useful product with their audiences and make some money in the process.

With this content partnership (each site contributed content to the other), Mint exposed its valuable, free product to more than 3 million readers who would likely be interested in its service. This postlaunch content partnership combined targeting blogs with elements of business development and was a big win for the Mint team.

A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they are working on.

Build real relationships with the specific reporters covering your startup’s market. Read what they write, comment, offer them industry expertise, and follow them on Twitter.

Keyword research is the first core component of a strong SEM strategy. With Google’s Keyword Planner, you can discover the top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. When you enter a term in this tool, it tells you how often

your keyword (and similar terms) is searched. Other tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu are valuable for discovering keywords your competition uses to attract customers.

You can further refine this keyword list by adding more qualifying terms to the end of each base term, creating what are known as “long-tail keywords.” For example, if you wanted to reach people searching for “census data,” you could make that a more targeted search term by adding “1990” to form “1990 census data” or even more long-tail like “1990 Philadelphia census data.” Long-tail keywords are less co...

A campaign is a collection of ads designed to achieve one high-level goal, like selling shoes. You first create different ad groups. For example, if you’re an e-commerce store, you might create an ad group for each product type (e.g., sneakers). You then select keywords you want your ad groups to appear for

(e.g., “Nike sneakers”). After you’ve determined the ad groups and keywords you are targeting, create your first ad. When you write an ad, the title should be catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. You will also want to include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad. Finally, you will want to conclude with a prominent call to action (CTA) like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!” Once you set up your ads, you should use the Google Analytics URL Builder tool to create unique URLs (Web addresses) that point to your landing pages. These URLs will enable you to track which ads are converting, not just the ones that are receiving the most clicks.

Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score by a wide margin. Because your ad’s relevance to a particular keyword has the biggest impact on your CTR, you should tailor your ads to the keywords they’ll appear against, either manually or dynamically (for example by using AdWords’ Dynamic Keyword Insertion feature). Several sources have mentioned that an average CTR for an AdWords campaign is around 2 percent, and that Google assigns a low quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5 percent. If any of your keywords are getting such low CTRs, rewrite those ads, test them on a different audience, or ditch them altogether.

You should also consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords, or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. With retargeting, people who visit your site will see your ads elsewhere on the Internet. These ads often convert at a higher rate, as they are aimed at prospects who have already visited your site at least once.

To get started in display advertising, first understand the types of ads that work in your industry. Tools like MixRank and Adbeat show you the ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads. Then you can determine whether a site’s audience is the right

This tactic also works well with content distribution networks like Outbrain and Sharethrough. Each of these ad networks promotes your content on popular partner sites like Forbes, Thought Catalog, Vice, Gothamist, and hundreds more. These native ad platforms make your content look like any other piece of (native) content on the target site.

Major Social Sites Here are some well-known social sites where you could advertise. LinkedIn—LinkedIn’s social network is made up of more than 250 million business professionals. LinkedIn ads allow targeting by job title, company, industry, and other business demographics, all factors you can’t easily target elsewhere. Twitter—Twitter also has roughly 250 million users. Twitter’s ads come in the form of sponsored tweets that appear in users’ feeds. Nikhil mentioned that one of the most effective approaches on Twitter is to turn on paid advertising around real-time events that your audience cares about (e.g., sportswear ads during major sporting events). Facebook—Facebook has more than one billion active users on its social network. From an advertising perspective, Facebook offers companies the ability to buy targeted ads based on users’ interests, pages they like, or even people they’re connected with. This granular targeting allows you to target very small groups of people. In fact, Gabriel once ran a test campaign that targeted only his wife! (He targeted her by her alma mater, zip code, and interest affinities, using a picture of their son to see how long it would take for her to notice. Not very long.) The platform also allows you to reach the larger network of people connected through your fans on Facebook. As Nikhil said: When you buy a Facebook ad, you’re buying more than just a targeted fan; you’re buying the opportunity to access that fan’s social graph. With the ...