Summary
Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares provide startups the tools for generating explosive customer growth. This book explains that most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product, they fail because they can’t get traction. Building a successful company is difficult. Smart entrepreneurs understands that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers. This book talks about 19 marketing channels and a framework to choose the marketing channel. Traction is the best way to improve your chances of startup success.
Why you should read this book?
You will learn about 19 channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on interviews with more than 40 successful founders, where you’ll learn, how to: Test different channels so you can find the ones that will get you traction Define your goal and critical path Actively work to overcome your traction channel biases. Learn about 19 channels in details “Traction” is an ultimate start up guide for getting customers!
Reviews
“Anyone–founders, managers, and executives–trying to break through to new customers can use this smart, ambitious book.” —Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup “Here is the inside scoop, the latest, most specific tactics from the red-hot center of the internet marketing universe. From someone who has done it. Twice.” —Seth Godin, author of Linchpin “A common question I get is: ‘How do I know if my business is getting traction, or how do I get traction for my business, or how do I get users?’ Traction answers all of these questions and more.” —James Altucher, author of Choose Yourself “The entrepreneurs who walk out of our offices with term sheets walk into them with Traction. It’s a pragmatic guide to solving the entrepreneur’s number one challenge.” —Fred Wilson, partner of Union Square Ventures “The question every founder asks after shipping is always: how do I get traction? This book actually answers it.” —Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of reddit “Traction is a critical guide for entrepreneurs looking to grow and scale their businesses.” —Patrick Vlaskovits, bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur
Main Concepts
The main concepts covered in this book are 19 channels that we can use to market our startup and a Bull’s eye framework which helps us identify which channel to use using different types of tests. Author first introduce you with those 19 channels and then talks about the framework for decision making to use the channels. After that author explains each channel in details in every chapter of the book.
Quotes
Traction trumps everything. Traction is basically quantitative evidence of customer demand. So if you’re in enterprise software, [initial traction] may be two or three early customers who are paying a bit; if you’re in consumer software the bar might be as high as hundreds of thousands of users. 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.
Conclusion
Traction teaches you about the nineteen channels that you can use to build a customer base and provides a three-step framework to figure out which ones will work the best for your business. It doesn’t matter how you implement them, the lessons and examples will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs. Understanding and determining the right marketing channel is the key to successful marketing.
