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November 10 - November 19, 2018
I built a karma widget that would display links to your social media profiles and how many followers you had on each service. People would embed it on their sites and at the bottom there would be a link back to DuckDuckGo that said “new search engine.”
Traction is basically quantitative evidence of customer demand. So if you’re in enterprise software, [initial traction] may be two or three early customers who are paying a bit; if you’re in consumer software the bar might be as high as hundreds of thousands of users.
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:
If you want to add 100,000 new customers, with conversion rates between 1 and 5 percent, you’re looking at reaching 2 to 10 million people in a targeted marketing campaign—those are huge numbers!
Set your growth goals. Focus on strategies and tactics that can plausibly move the needle for your company. Get some hard numbers.
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.
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?
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?
You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working toward. This could be one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers,
Many users were happy to place the small badge on their Web site in order to get early access to a product they wanted. Mint had six hundred blogs display the badge and fifty thousand users signed up through them. This strategy also gave Mint an SEO boost from the hundreds of new links pointing to Mint.com.
Delicious allows you to use keywords to find links that others have saved, which can unearth new blogs.
Subject: Exclusive for TC: Launching PadPressed—make any blog feel like a native iPad app Hey Mike, Launching PadPressed tomorrow at noon EST and TC gets free rein on an exclusive before then. PadPressed makes any blog look and behave like a native iPad app. We’re talking accelerometer aware column resizing, swipe to advance articles, touch navigation, home screen icon support, and more. We’ve built some pretty cool tech to make this happen smoothly, and it works with your existing layout (iPad layout only activated when the blog is accessed from an iPad). Okay, I’ll shut up now and you can
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A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
Subject: Quick question Hey [name], I wanted to shoot you a note because I loved your post on [similar topic that did a lot of traffic]. I was going to give the following to our publicist, but I thought I would go to you with the exclusive because I read and really enjoy your stuff. My [company built a user base of 25,000 paying customers in two months without advertising / book blows the lid off an enormous XYZ scandal]. And I did it completely off the radar. This means you would be the first to have it. I can write up any details you’d need to make it great. Do you think this might be a good
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Another starting point is to offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industry. One of your many jobs as a startup founder is to stay on top of market trends. If you have a good feel for the pulse of your market, you can send reporters follow-up insights on specific stories. At the same time let them know that you are generally available as an industry source.
Submit the story to link-sharing sites (reddit, Hacker News) with larger audiences. Share it on social networks to drive awareness, which you can further amplify with social ads. Email it to influencers in your industry for comment. Some of them will share it with their audiences. Ping blogs in your space and tell them that you have a story that’s getting some buzz. These writers may then want to jump in themselves to cover you.
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.
Have newsworthy milestones to share. Contact reporters only when you can package your milestones into a compelling emotional story. When you do make a pitch, keep it short and sweet!
Blendtec is a blender manufacturer located in southern Utah. In 2007, its team decided to create a series of videos called “Will It Blend?” In these videos, Blendtec’s CEO stood by one of its blenders and blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone.
KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu are valuable for discovering keywords your competition uses to attract customers.
Use search engine ads to test product positioning and messaging (even before you fully build it!).
Use longer keywords. Known as long-tail keywords, they are often less competitive because they have lower search volumes. As such, they are cheaper and so can be more profitable—you just may have to aggregate a lot of them to get the volume you need to move the needle.
The largest display ad networks are Google’s Display Network (also known as the Google content network), Advertising.com (owned by AOL), Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade.
Contact small sites directly for display ads. Ask them to run your ads for a small fee.
If you want to buy space on a billboard, you’ll probably contact one of three companies: Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO to learn the fundamentals.
Widgets—giving site owners useful things to add to their sites, which also contain links back to yours.
In SEO, there are a few big don’ts. The biggest: don’t buy links. Buying links is against search engine guidelines and companies get heavily penalized for doing so. Similarly, trying to trick search engines in any way can lead to serious ranking penalties.
Generate long-tail landing pages by using cheap freelancers. Or, if your product can naturally produce good long-tail content, use it to create the landing pages yourself.
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.
For these emails, you should determine the steps absolutely necessary to get value from your product. Then create targeted emails to make sure people complete those steps.
With tools like Vero and Customer.io, automating these messages is easy. For example, you can use these tools to send an email to people who have not activated their account within three days of signing up for a free trial. You can also 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.
Some companies send emails that showcase your previous engagement with the product. For example, photo sites will send you pictures you took a year ago.
One trick Colin told us about was not to send any email that comes from a “Noreply” email address (e.g., noreply@facebook.com).
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.
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.
The viral coefficient, or K, is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. The viral coefficient formula is: K = i * conversion percentage where K is the viral coefficient, i is the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage is the percentage of customers who sign up
Signs of social proof (such as pictures of happy customers, case studies, press mentions, and statistics about product usage)
Allowing users to test the product before signing up Ease of signup (Facebook Connect, Twitter login, etc.)
Another company that nails engineering as marketing is Moz, the leader in SEO software. Two of its free SEO tools, Followerwonk and Open Site Explorer, have driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz. Like Marketing Grader, each solves a problem that an ideal Moz customer has. 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.
Chris Fralic, former head of business development at Delicious and Half.com, told us that creating a Delicious bookmark widget more than tripled the adoption of its social bookmarking product.
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 a very simple spreadsheet: Company, Partner Type (Publisher, Carrier, Reseller, etc.), Contact Person/Email, Size, Relevance, Ease of Use, and then a subjective priority score. That list should be exhaustive. There’s no reason why any company shouldn’t have fifty potential business development partners in their pipeline, maybe one hundred, and be actively working the phones, inboxes, and pounding the pavement to get the deals you need to get—be it for distribution, revenue, PR, or just to outflank a competitor.
Chris pitched all kinds of deals during his time at Delicious, the social bookmarking site. While he was there, he worked on deals with The Washington Post, Mozilla, and Wikipedia to integrate Delicious tags. Delicious approached its potential partners with a clear idea of how each of them would benefit from a partnership. For The Washington Post, the value proposition was to use Delicious’s social bookmarks to optimize content for social media. The Washington Post’s decision to partner was made even easier because it was a simple integration with very little downside. After Delicious
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The even more transformative partnership we did at Delicious was with Mozilla. [Mozilla] ended up promoting the Delicious extension for the Firefox browser in a really big way when they did an upgrade to Firefox 2.0.
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?
Does this problem hurt your productivity? How many people does this issue impact, and in what ways? What customer or employee turnover are you experiencing because of this problem?
