Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

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?

You want to design smaller-scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort.

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.

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?

(perhaps two social ads with two landing pages)

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.

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 your company, your milestones will be different, but the point is to be critical and strategic in deciding what to include. That’s why it is called the Critical Path. For example, you may think that to reach your traction goal you will need to hire three people, add features A, B, and C to your product, and engage in marketing activities X, Y, and Z. These are the milestones you need to do to get where you want to go. Do you really need feature C or marketing activity Y? This is where founders often mess up: by focusing their limited company resources on things off Critical Path. You are generally competing with companies with significantly more resources than you. You cannot afford to waste what little resources you have.

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. Building such assessment into your management processes is a good idea. Quantify traction subgoals and put them on a calendar so you can properly monitor your progress over time.

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. Which traction channels do you know most about? Which traction...

Most sites make their money from advertisements, so they want to drive as many page views as possible. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets now want to hear from you because you will drive visits and make them more money.

This means you no longer have to pitch CNN directly if you want to get on TV. Instead, you can pitch smaller sites (ones that are easier to get coverage from) whose content is often picked up by larger media outlets. If you tell your story right, you can create buzz around your company and capture the attention of larger sources. Next thing you know, you can put “As seen on CNN” on your Web site.

A publicity stunt is anything that is engineered to get media coverage.

By creating a spectacle around every one of his product launches, Richard Branson turns uninteresting product launches into international headlines.

The second type of unconventional PR is customer appreciation: smaller, more scalable actions (like holding contests or sending handwritten notes to customers) that both increase goodwill as well as generate press coverage.

Before their launch, the team at Half.com spent weeks brainstorming ways they could get on the national radar. Eventually, they came up with the unconventional idea to rename a town! And, in one of the most well-executed startup PR stunts, for one year the little town of Halfway, Oregon, was known as Half.com.

Alexis did the same thing at reddit. In its early days, he handed out free T-shirts with the reddit alien on the front. He personally emailed users to thank them for spending time on the site and did everything he could to make early redditors feel appreciated for being part of the community. These stories became a central theme in reddit’s early press articles and had a pronounced effect on the brand.

Holding a contest is a great, repeatable way to generate publicity and get some word of mouth. Shopify.com, a popular e-commerce platform, is famous for its annual Build a Business competition (and its six-figure prize). Last year, the contest drove 1,900 new customers and more than $3.5 million in sales on its platform.

Hipmunk has run similar events, like its Mother’s Day Giveaway. For this promotion, company staff asked customers to tell them why they love their mothers more than Hipmunk. They received hundreds of submissions via Twitter and sent flowers and chocolates to the moms of the lucky winners. For $500, Hipmunk generated a lot of attention, increased its follower count, and made several customers (and their moms) Hipmunk fans for life.

Bestie day - reward oh our best friend

Unconventional PR tactics can have incredible returns on investment. Half.com spent $70,000 and made two hires to generate hundreds of articles and more than 40 million impressions. Dollar Shave Club acquired more than twelve thousand customers with a short video that cost $5,000. Hipmunk received thousands of Facebook likes from a chipmunk-drawing contest that cost the company $500. Blendtec increased its sales by over 500 percent after starting the Will It Blend? series.

Do something big, cheap, fun, and original. A publicity stunt is anything that is engineered to generate a large amount of media coverage. They are often hard to do consistently well, but just one well-executed stunt can move the needle for your company. Publicity stunts need to be creative and extraordinary to succeed. Some types that have been successful repeatedly are competitive stunts and viral videos.

The demographics of each advertising medium are the most important factor to consider when making an offline ads purchase. For example, ads in the classified section of a newspaper will appeal primarily to an older crowd that still buys newspapers. You’ll want to think about location, gender, race, age, income, and occupation—and how each matches up with your target audience.

audience prospectus (sometimes called an ad kit) from whatever company is selling the ad inventory.

Offline ads are much harder to track as compared with online ads that have tracking built in. Successful offline tracking involves the use of unique Web addresses and promotional codes to measure effectiveness. For example, we could create flyers that link to tractionbook.com/flyer. By tracking visits to that specific URL, we could approximate how many visits originated from our flyer campaign.

As we discussed earlier, many startups fall into the product trap—building a product before thinking about distribution.

Rick’s first hire was actually a full-time blogger! As he said:

This blog-from-the-beginning approach allowed Unbounce to launch with an email list over five thousand strong. This wasn’t your typical startup product launch.

After every post they wrote, they’d ping influencers on Twitter asking for feedback.

Unbounce further capitalized on its blog traffic by giving away free infographics and e-books to grow its email list.

The most common hurdle in content marketing is writer’s block. To overcome it, simply write about the problems facing your target customers.

Presumably, you know more about the industry you’re working in than your potential customers. This means that you should be able to provide insight on subjects they care about.

Every single industry has issues people ...

“Exactly What to Say in Your First Message,” addressed the concerns of online dating users in an entertaining way.

Unbounce found that infographics are shared about twenty times more often than a typical blog post and have a higher likelihood of getting picked up by other online publications.

The secret to shareable content is showing readers they have a problem they didn’t know about, or at least couldn’t fully articulate.

but it’s not as good for drawing in readers as showing them they’ve been going about some aspect of their life all wrong.

Fortunately, there are ways to build momentum faster. Unbounce engaged in any online forum where conversations were taking place about online marketing, and did its best to contribute.

One of the best methods of growing your audience is guest posting. This tactic is especially powerful in the early days when you essentially have no audience to work with yourself. Unbounce started doing guest posts on other popular blogs after just three months of blogging on its own.

One of the best things about this traction channel is how it positions you as a leader in your space. Unbounce and OkCupid are both great examples of how a popular blog can make a company a recognized industry leader in a highly competitive space.

Recognition as a primary voice in an industry leads to opportunities to speak at major conferences, give press quotes to journalists, and influence industry direction. It also means your content is shared many more times than it would be otherwise.

Having a strong company blog can positively impact at least eight other traction channels—SEO, publicity, email marketing, targeting blogs, community building, offline events, existing platforms, and business development.

If 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.

As such, email marketing works best when it is personalized.

We urge you to build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.

Traction channels such as SEO or content marketing can help you build your email lists.

At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address.

Another popular approach to building an email list is creating a short, free course related to your area of expertise. These mini-courses are meant to educate potential customers about your problem space and product. At the end of the course you put a call to action, such as asking people to purchase your product, start a free trial, or share something with their friends.

In addition to your own email list, consider advertising on email newsletters complementary to your product.