Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

Traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup.

If you’re starting a company, chances are you can build a product. Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.

Having a product or service that your early customers love, but having no clear way to get more traction is a major problem. To solve this problem, spend your time constructing your product or service and testing traction channels in parallel.

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.

We talked about the problems we aimed to solve. . . . Instead of beta testing a product, we beta tested an idea and integrated the feedback we received from our readers early on in our product development process.

Before you can set about getting traction, you have to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. At the earliest stages, this traction goal is usually to get enough traction to either raise funding or become profitable. In any case, you should figure out what this goal means in terms of hard numbers. How many customers do you need and at what growth rate?

you can think about working on a product or service in three phases: Phase I—making something people want Phase II—marketing something people want Phase III—scaling your business

Phase I is very product focused and involves pursuing initial traction while also building your initial product. This often means getting traction in ways that don’t scale—giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you have relationships with, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front

Graham said in his essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale”: A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. . . . The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

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...

it is actually useful to look at AngelList and look at companies who just got funded; that will give you an idea of where the bar is right now.

contact individuals who intimately understand what you’re working on (perhaps because they have worked on or invested in something similar before).

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.

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?

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.

Critical Path is a framework to help you decide what not to do. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your Critical Path. Every activity is either on path or not. If it is not on the path, don’t do it!

The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you’re going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.

The basic SEM process is to find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and then test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, you remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to better-performing ads and landing pages to keep improving results.

name three venture capitalists or ask your startup friends to do so. Many people will mention Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, or Mark Suster.

you blog, dedicate at least six months to it. A company blog can take a significant amount of time to start taking off. Do things that don’t scale early on. Reaching out to individuals to share posts, for instance, is okay, because you’re building toward a point where your content will spread on its own. Contacting influential industry leaders (on Twitter, etc.), doing guest posts, writing about recent news events, and creating shareable infographics are all great ways to increase the rate of growth of your audience. Produce in-depth posts you can’t find anywhere else. You need to create quality content to succeed in this traction channel. There is no silver bullet, but a decent approach is to write about problems your target customers have. Another approach (not mutually exclusive) is to run experiments or use data from your company that leads to a surprising conclusion.

Customer activation is a critical and often-overlooked component of building a successful product. “Activating” a customer means getting them to engage with your product enough that they are an active customer.

use initial emails to get customer feedback. Colin sends each new Customer.io signup an automated, personal email thirty minutes after they sign up. Here’s the email: Subject: Help getting started? Hey {{ customer.first_name }}, I’m Colin, CEO of Customer.io. I wanted to reach out to see if you need any help getting started. Cheers, Colin

Copywriting is an art on its own, but we suggest checking out some of the resources and information that Copy Hackers provides.

Personalize your email marketing messages. Email marketing is a personal traction channel. Messages come into your inbox along with email from your friends and family. Build an email list of prospective customers whether you end up focusing on this traction channel or not. You can utilize email marketing at any step of your relationship with a customer, including customer acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue generation. Set up a series of automated emails. Often called life cycle or drip sequences, this technique works best when the series of emails adapts to how people have interacted with your product. Use online tools to test and optimize email campaigns. These tools have built-in templates and A/B testing ability and will track open and click rates.

When you enter your site’s Web address into Marketing Grader, you get back a customized report about how well you’re doing with your online marketing (social media mentions, blog post shares, basic SEO). This tool is free and gives you valuable information.

Followerwonk allows people to analyze their Twitter followers and get tips on growing their audience. Open Site Explorer allows people to see where sites are getting links, which is valuable competitive intelligence for any SEO campaign.

Create a stand-alone, low-friction site to engage potential customers. Make sure it naturally leads to your main offering. The case for spending engineering resources on marketing becomes much stronger when you think about these marketing tools as long-term assets that bring in new leads indefinitely after only a small amount of up-front investment. Look internally for site and tool ideas. Perhaps you have already started creating something for yourself that could also be used by potential customers? Another approach is to turn a popular blog post into a microsite. Make them as simple as possible. Single-purpose tools that solve obvious pain points are best. Put them on their own Web sites and make them easy to find, particularly through search engines.

With sales, you’re selling directly to a customer. With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.

Pursue mutually beneficial partnerships. In a standard partnership, two companies work together to make one or both of their products better by leveraging the unique capabilities of the other. Other major types of BD deals include partnerships focused on joint ventures, licensing, distribution, and inventory. You need to understand why a potential partner might want to work with you. What are their incentives? Just as you are evaluating potential partnerships in terms of your core metrics, they will be doing the same. Focus on meeting your startup’s core metrics. Good business development deals align with your company and product strategy and are focused on strategic product and distribution milestones. Avoid deals that don’t directly align with your traction goal. Create a pipeline of deals you’re constantly working on. For initial testing, you can reach out to a variety of potential partners to gauge interest.

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers.

early conversations are all about exploring the prospect’s problem and pain points.

Situation questions. These questions help you learn about a prospect’s buying situation. Typical questions include How many employees do you have? and How is your organization structured? Ask only one or two of these questions per conversation, because the more situation questions a salesperson asks, the less likely he or she is to close a sale. That’s because people feel like they’re giving you information without getting anything in return.

Problem questions. These are questions that clarify the buyer’s pain points. Are you happy with your current solution? What problems do you face with it? Like situation questions, these questions should be used sparingly.

quickly define the problem they’re facing so you can focus on the implications of this problem and how your solution helps.

Implication questions. These questions are meant to make a prospect aware of the implications that stem from the problem they’re facing. These questions are based on information you uncovered while asking your problem questions. Questions could include: Does this problem hurt your productivity? How many people does this issue impact, and in w...

These questions should make your prospect feel the problem is larger and more urgent than he or sh...

Need-payoff questions. These questions focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of addressing the problem.

How do you feel this solution would help you? What type of impact would this have on you if we were to implement this within the next few months? Whose life would improve if this problem was solved, and how?

The SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) question model is a natural progression.

Process—How does the company buy solutions like the one you’re offering? Need—How badly does this company need a solution like yours? Authority—Which individuals have the authority to make the purchase happen? Money—Do they have the funds to buy what you’re selling? How much does not solving the problem cost them? Estimated Timing—What are the budget and decision time lines for a purchase?

closing emails with a direct question such as “Will you agree to this closing time line?”

The first goal is to drive leads into the top of the funnel. Usually, this means using other traction channels to make people aware of your product.

The next stage in a sales funnel is lead qualification. Here, you want to determine how ready a prospect is to buy, and if they’re a prospect in which you should invest additional resources.

Once you’ve qualified your leads, the final step is to create a purchase time line and convert prospects to paying customers.

no matter how good your sales team, the customer is the one who decides to buy your product. It is crucial to keep the customer in mind as you design your sales funnel, meaning you should make their decision to buy as easy as possible.

A lot of companies design their sales cycles around how they think things should work. I believe very strongly in the notion that you have to design it from the customer standpoint inwards, as opposed to your standpoint outwards, which is the normal way I see people thinking about this stuff.

Don’t rule out cold calling. Good first customers have a burning need to address a problem, are interested in your approach to solving their problem, and are willing to work with you closely. Sometimes cold calling is the only way to find them. Build a repeatable sales model. An effective sales funnel has prospects enter at the top, qualifies these leads, and closes them effectively. Map out your sales funnel, identify blockages, and remove them. Keep the buying process as simple as possible. Get the buyer to commit to time lines. To close sales effectively, get an affirmative at each point that you are on track to close. Always know exactly what steps are left. Keep the customer’s perspective in mind. Talk to people who need your product and understand their common concerns. Address those concerns specifically on your Web site.