Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

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.