Traction Quotes

“Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Poor distribution - not product - is the number one cause of failure.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. 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.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“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.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“To be clear, splitting your time evenly between product and traction will certainly slow down product development. However, it counterintuitively won’t slow the time to get your product successfully to market. In fact, it will speed it up! That’s because pursuing product development and traction in parallel has a couple of key benefits. First, it helps you build the right product because you can incorporate knowledge from your traction efforts. If you’re following a good product development process, you’re already getting good feedback from early customers. However, these customers are generally too close to you. They often tell you what you want to hear.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“In the case of querymongo.com, RJMetrics built a tool that translates SQL queries to MongoDB syntax (two database technologies). This”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“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.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Many entrepreneurs think that if you build a killer product, your customers will beat a path to your door. This line of thinking is a fallacy: that the best use of your time is always improving your product. In other words, “if you build it, they will come” is wrong.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“The faster you run high-quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. 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.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Phase I is very product focused and involves pursuing initial traction while also building your initial product. This often means getting traction in ways that don’t scale—giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you have relationships with, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“One such network is The Deck, which targets the niche audience of Web creatives. As an advertiser, you know exactly the audience you’re reaching.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“refresh your memory, here are the nineteen channels: Targeting Blogs Publicity Unconventional PR Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Social and Display Ads Offline Ads Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Marketing Email Marketing Viral Marketing Engineering as Marketing Business Development (BD) Sales Affiliate Programs Existing Platforms Trade Shows Offline Events Speaking Engagements Community Building”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Zynga (the maker of FarmVille and other games) did this with Facebook, dominating its advertising and sharing features when there was relatively little competition. For a gaming company today, it’s basically impossible to leverage Facebook to grow the way Zynga did just a few years ago—it’s just too expensive and too crowded. However, the company that leverages a newer platform that’s growing quickly will have a significant advantage over companies chasing the same old methods.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Phase I—making something people want Phase II—marketing something people want Phase III—scaling your business”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“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? Your traction strategy should always be focused on moving the needle for your traction goal. By moving the needle, we mean focusing on marketing activities that result in a measurable, significant impact on your traction goal. It should be something that advances your user acquisition goal in a meaningful way, not something that would be just a blip even if it worked.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Through traction development you get a steady stream of cold customers. It is through these people that you can really find out whether the market is taking to your product or not, and if not, what features are missing or which parts of the experience are broken.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, sums up this common problem: The number one reason that we pass on entrepreneurs we’d otherwise like to back is they’re focusing on product to the exclusion of everything else. Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy. Even worse is when they insist that they don’t need one, or call [their] no distribution strategy a “viral marketing strategy.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“To be clear, splitting your time evenly between product and traction will certainly slow down product development. However, it counterintuitively won’t slow the time to get your product successfully to market. In fact, it will speed it up! That’s because pursuing product development and traction in parallel has a couple of key benefits.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“In phase I, it’s getting those first customers that prove your product can get traction. In phase II, it is getting enough customers that you’re knocking on the door of sustainability. And in phase III, your focus is on increasing your earnings, scaling your marketing channels, and creating a truly sustainable business.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“waiting until you launch a product to embark on traction development usually results in one or more additional product development cycles as you adjust to real market feedback. That’s why doing traction and product development in parallel may slow down product development in the short run, but in the long run it’s the opposite.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“There are four common situations where you could build something people want, but still not end up with a viable business. First, you could build something people want, but for which you just can’t figure out a viable business model. The money isn’t adding up. For example, people won’t pay, and selling advertising won’t cover the bills. There is just no real market. Second, you could build something people want, but there are just not enough customers to reach profitability. It’s just too small a market, and there aren’t obvious ways to expand. This occurs often when startups aren’t ambitious enough and pick too narrow a niche. Third, you could build something people want, but reaching them is cost prohibitive. You find yourself in a hard-to-reach market. An example is a relatively inexpensive product that requires a direct sales force to sell it. That combo just doesn’t work. Finally, you could build something people want, but a lot of other companies build it too. In this situation you are in a hypercompetitive market where it is simply too hard to get customers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“spend your time constructing your product or service and testing traction channels in parallel.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“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.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“After your growth curve flattens, what worked before usually will not get you to the next level.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Many entrepreneurs think that if you build a killer product, your customers will beat a path to your door. We call this line of thinking The Product Trap: the fallacy that the best use of your time is always improving your product. In other words, “if you build it, they will come” is wrong.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“In other words, traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“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 are enough customers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers