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

“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

“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

“we had not started blogging at the beginning the way we did, Unbounce”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Though media outlets are increasingly on the lookout for good stories, there are still challenges to getting exposure. Tens of thousands of companies are clamoring for media coverage. Jason Kincaid, a former reporter at TechCrunch, told us that he got pitched over 50 times each day. What gets a reporter’s attention? Milestones: raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier, a PR stunt, big partnership or a special industry report. Each of these events is interesting and noteworthy enough to potentially generate some coverage. Jason advises bundling smaller announcements together into one big announcement whenever possible. Breaking a useage barrier is great. Releasing a new version is noteworthy. But releasing a new version and breaking a usage barrier in the process is even more compelling.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“In the context of startups, literally “going viral” means that every user you acquire brings in at least one other user.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Pursue traction and product development in parallel, and spend equal time on both.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“It’s the Supreme Court definition of porn. You’ll know it when you see it.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“When you encourage your customers to connect around your startup, they feel more cohesive as a community and can come up with ideas that you may not think of yourself.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“The two key factors that drive viral growth are the viral coefficient and the viral cycle time.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“The Product Trap: the fallacy that the best use of your time is always improving your product.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting 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: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction. Building”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“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.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting 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: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Having a product or service that your early customers love, but having no clear way to get more traction is a major problem. To solve this problem, 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

“The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“When people gamble, but they don’t tell themselves they’re gambling (as investors do), they need information to justify their decisions, and they need social proof and examples and evidence that they’re doing the right thing.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Startups get pulled in a lot of different directions. There are always opportunities in front of you or on the horizon that you could focus on.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“Traction is the best way to improve your chances of startup success. Traction is a sign that something is working. If you charge for your product, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it’s a growing user base.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“If you’ve ever bought a bottled Starbucks Frappuccino or Doubleshot Espresso, you’ve purchased a product that’s the result of the decade-long joint venture between Starbucks and Pepsi.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

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

“Where I see 90% of startups fail is because they can’t reach their customers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“The secret to shareable content is showing readers they have a problem they didn’t know about, or at least couldn’t fully articulate.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“many startups fall into the product trap – building a product before thinking about distribution.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“What do you have that they [big companies] need? You’re more focused than they are. You have an idea and you’re solving a problem. You’ve developed content or technology and you have a focus. That is very difficult to do at a big corporation.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“You should know what marketing strategies have worked in your industry, as well as the history of companies in your space. It’s especially important to understand how similar companies acquired customers over time, and how unsuccessful companies wasted their marketing dollars.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers