Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

traction trumps everything.

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.

Trust Me, I’m Lying,

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.

These interactions also get you additional data, like what messaging is resonating with potential customers, what niche you might focus on first, what types of customers will be easiest to acquire, and what major distribution roadblocks you might run into.

From the perspective of getting traction, 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

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.

It is a moving target. The entire ecosystem is getting far more efficient. Companies are accomplishing a lot more with a lot less. Two years ago [November 2010] you could have gotten your daily deal startup funded pre-traction. Eighteen months ago you could not have gotten a daily deal startup funded no matter how much traction you had. Twelve months ago you could have gotten your mobile app company funded with ten thousand downloads. Today it’s probably going to take a few hundred thousand downloads and a strong rapid adoption rate for a real financing to take place. The definition of traction keeps changing as the environment gets competitive. That’s why 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.

Sustainable product engagement growth (i.e., more customers getting engaged over time) is hard for any investor to ignore. This is true even if your absolute numbers are relatively small. So if you have only a hundred customers, but have been growing 10 percent a month for six months, that’s attractive to investors. With sustainable growth, you look like a good bet to succeed in the long run. With investing, always remember that traction trumps everything

[You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing—everything but the kitchen sink. That is a really bad idea. It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. 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. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. If you were to advertise offline, where would be the best place to do it? If you were to give a speech, who would be the ideal audience? 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. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Specifically running ads on reddit, Twitter, or Facebook is a channel strategy within social ads. Through brainstorming, identify the best channel strategy you can think of in each of the nineteen traction channels.

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.

Work through Bullseye. Maximize your chances of getting traction: brainstorm, prioritize, test, and then focus. Do not overlook underutilized channels. In fact, those channels are more likely to be the ones that will work best. 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. Even after you’ve chosen your core channel, you should keep these ideas around for future runs of Bullseye.

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?

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.

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. There are many tools to help you do this type of testing online, such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.

The … solution to solving the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs, even momentarily, is to discover the next untapped marketing [strategy]…. If you can make these [strategies] work with a strong product behind [them], then great. Chances are, you’ll enjoy a few months if not a few years of strong marketing performance before they too slowly succumb.

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.

Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.

each test you run should have a point—to validate or invalidate specific assumptions you specify ahead of time.

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.

TARGETS Look for customers where others aren’t looking. Keep a lookout for the cutting-edge tactics that haven’t yet succumbed to the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs. Run cheap tests to quickly validate assumptions and test new ideas. Constantly optimize. You should consistently run A/B tests in your efforts to optimize a traction channel strategy. There are many online tools that can help you test more easily and evaluate your use of various traction strategies and tactics. Keep it numerical. Look for ways to quantify your marketing efforts, especially when deciding which traction strategies to pursue and comparing them within Bullseye. You should have an idea at all times of what numbers it will take to move the needle, and focus your traction efforts only on strategies that could possibly do so.

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working toward. This could be one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers, or 10 percent of your market.

In other words, 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!

I’ll bet you a lot of your competition will refuse to even try these channels. And if that’s true, that’s even more reason to go try those channels! It can almost be a competitive advantage (at least a temporary one) if you can acquire customers in channels that others cannot, or refuse to try. That’s more interesting than duking it out with AdWords competitors in positions one to three.

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 channels do you know least about? Mentors can help here.

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.

He simply sent them a message with “Can I send you $500?”

Search Engines—Simply search for things like “top blogs for x” or “best x blogs.” YouTube—Doing a simple search for your product keywords on YouTube shows you the most popular videos in your industry. These videos are often associated with influencers who have blogs, and you can use references to their videos as icebreakers to start building relationships with them. This tactic can be applied to other video sharing sites, such as Vimeo and Dailymotion. Delicious—Delicious allows you to use keywords to find links that others have saved, which can unearth new blogs. Twitter—Using Twitter search is another easy way to find blogs in a niche. You can also use tools like Followerwonk and Klout to determine the top Twitter accounts in your industry. Social Mention—Social Mention helps you determine the sites that have the most frequent mentions for your keywords. Talk to People—The most effective way to figure out what your target audience is really reading online is by asking them directly!

Run tests on a variety of smaller blogs. See what type of audience resonates best with your product and messaging. There are a variety of tools you can use to uncover relevant blogs, including YouTube, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, search engines, Google Alerts, and Social Mention. You can also ask people! Sponsor small blogs, especially personal blogs. Providing influential bloggers early access or offering early access in exchange for spreading the word are other effective strategies. Offer something unique to your best targets. Build a special offer just for them and put together a draft guest post that they can run with.

It’s better to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. For them, the direct approach is rarely the best approach. Instead, you approach obliquely. So you find the blogs that TechCrunch reads and gets story ideas from. Chances are it will be easier to get that blog’s attention. You pitch there, which leads The New York Times to email you or do a story about you based on the information [they’ve seen] on their news radar.

Blogs have an enormous influence over other blogs, making it possible to turn a post on a site with only a little traffic into posts on much bigger sites, if the latter happens to read the former. Blogs compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to “confirm” it, and then pundits compete for airtime to opine on it. The smaller sites legitimize the newsworthiness of the story for the sites with bigger audiences.

Milestones: raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier, a PR stunt, a big partnership, or a special industry report. Each of these events is interesting and noteworthy enough to potentially generate some coverage.

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 check out the demo links/feature pages below, which are much more interesting than my pitch. PS—Would also be happy to do giveaways to TC readers. Thanks again and feel free to reach out if you have any more questions (Skype, phone, etc. listed below). Video Demo: http://vimeo.com/13487300 Live demo site (if you’re on an iPad): jasonlbaptiste.com Feature overviews: http://padpressed.com/features

Cold emil formt

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 fit? If so, should I draft something around [their average] words and send it to you, or do you prefer a different process? If not, I totally understand, and thanks for reading this much. All the best, [Your Name]

Cold email to reporter

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.

Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can. Here are a few ways to do it: 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.

“How We Did This” follow-up interviews are popular.

Focus on the right smaller sites. Press stories often “filter up,” meaning major news outlets are often looking to major blogs for story ideas, which in turn are looking at smaller blogs and forums. That means if you can generate buzz on those sites, you can increase your chances of getting picked up by bigger publications. 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!

Good customer support is so rare that, if you simply try to make your customers happy, they are likely to spread the news of your awesome product on that basis alone.

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. Be awesome to your customers and good things follow. Common ways to do customer appreciation well are through gifts, contests, and amazing customer support. Excelling in this area is a way to do unconventional PR over a longer period of time. Prepare for failure. Success in this channel is unpredictable. You should have a defined process for brainstorming and selecting ideas, but also understand that not every idea will work.

It informs a whole bunch of things that are really important in terms of the basic [metrics]: conversion rate of your landing pages, how well email captures are working … if you’re selling a product, what the average cost per customer is and what their lifetime value might be. Having those baseline metrics is critical for informing your strategy moving forward and determining what you need to work on.

We just wanted to learn as much as we could for as little cost as possible. So we would test different keyword segments, we would test different concepts.

Other tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu are valuable for discovering keywords your competition uses to attract customers.

Long-tail keywords are less competitive and have lower search volumes, which make them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.

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!”

The fundamental concepts of keyword research, market discovery, running split tests, ad tests, controlling your budget, trying to get as close to breaking even as possible, focusing on learning … I think those things all still apply. They certainly still apply to us as we build out new keyword segments. That part of the advice doesn’t change, even though the dynamics are more competitive.