Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

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.

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.

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.

Marketo started a blog about their solution even before developing it.

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?

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.

In any case, always consider your traction efforts in terms of whether they are moving the needle for your traction goal.

Why do these customers take to your product so well?

Think of your product as a leaky bucket. Your early traction efforts are pointing you toward the holes worth plugging.

If you’re not seeing the traction you want, look for bright spots in your customer base, pockets of customers who are truly engaged with your product. See if you can figure out why it works for them and if you can expand from that base.

For each channel, you should identify one decent channel strategy that has a chance of moving the needle.

What Lean is to product development, Bullseye is to traction.

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.

As more companies discover an effective strategy, it becomes crowded and expensive or ignored by consumers, thus becoming much less effective.

Once you have a core traction channel, it is often instructive to brainstorm the other eighteen traction channels in terms of how you might use them to support your core channel. Doing so could uncover some truly novel channel strategies that haven’t yet succumbed to the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs.

The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path.

Rather than leaving it up to reporters to figure out how to position the story, they now had a story “handle” they could grab when writing about the book.

If your pitch doesn’t draw a line in the sand—with some people shaking their heads and some people nodding—it won’t get discussed as widely as you hope.

It may surprise you to learn how effectively you can target customers through direct mail.

In fact, many companies like WP Engine now use advertising to drive leads to a landing page where they ask for an email rather than a sale. They then will use email marketing to sell a prospect over the course of a month or so.

In the context of startups, literally “going viral” means that every user you acquire brings in at least one other user.

It’s very, very expensive to use cold calling, and really not that effective by comparison with using marketing to get some kind of qualified prospect and then using sales to close that prospect.

Every year there’s a new platform, new device, new something, and as somebody who’s starting a company you should consider if there’s something really cool you can do on an upcoming platform.

A proactive and inexpensive method that requires no creativity is giving away as many bags with your company’s name on it as possible. Most attendees travel with armloads of pamphlets, catalogs, flyers, and giveaways. Stopping each to offer them a bag to put it in gets them talking to you but, more important, gets your name displayed all over the conference area.

Companies with customers who have shared interests, who have a kind of community or at least a need for one, I think that’s the type of company that will benefit most.

From hosting or sponsoring an event/conference

You can still build a business without being creative. If you don’t have creativity, you need money. You need one or the other.

People want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. You need to have a mission if you want to build an awesome community. A powerful mission gives your community a shared sense of purpose and motivates them to contribute.