Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“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 userbase.”

Key takeaway

Traction trumps everything

“In other words, traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup.”

Key takeaway

Traction is growth

“It’s hard to predict the channel that will work best. You can make educated guesses, but until you start running tests, it’s difficult to tell which channel is the best one for you right now.”

Key takeaway

Experimentation is the only way to know for sure

“After your growth curve flattens, what worked before usually will not get you to the next level. On the flip side, traction channels that seemed like long shots before might be worth reconsidering during your next iteration of Bullseye.”

Key takeaway

Use a backlog to revisit previously failed experiments because a new time and new context may produce different results

“This effective tracking and reporting system can be as complex as an analytics tool that does cohort analysis or can be as simple as a spreadsheet, but it must exist. Furthermore, each cheap test you run should have a point - to validate or invalidate specific assumption(s) in your model.”

Key takeaway

Every experiment has a hypothesis, you must try to validate or invalidate this assumption, but you need to measure it no matter what

“After you’ve run cheap tests, validated assumptions, and found a traction channel that is working, your goal is to optimize your use of that channel.”

Key takeaway

Double down when you find a channel that works

“If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid [advertising] behind that piece of content the magic happens. As more and more people see it, more and more people engage with it - because it’s a better piece of content...Paid is fundamentally only as good as the content you put behind it. And content is only as good as how many people actually see it.”

Key takeaway

Paid won’t magically make shitty content good

“Brenda Spoonemore, former VP of Interactive Services at the NBA, put it like this: “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. This is very difficult to do at a big corporation.”

Key takeaway

Startups focus on a niche and dominate that niche, which is hard to do for a big corporation because so many stakeholders want their area to receive the money and focus