Traction and product development should get 50-50 of your timeDefine your traction goal<ul><li>Phase I – Making something that people want</li><li>Phase II – Marketing something people want</li><li>Phase III – Scaling the business</li></ul>

Traction Thinking

<ul><li>There are two high-level strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail</li><li>Fat-head strategies involve trying to rank for search ranks that directly describe the company.</li><li>Long-tail strategies involve ranking for more specific terms with lower search volumes</li><li>SEO comes down to two things: content and links</li></ul>

Search Engine Optimization

<ul><li>Brainstorm every single traction channel to see which one works for you</li><li>Compile your brainstorming ideas for each traction channel in a spreadsheet with educated guesses</li><li>Run cheap traction tests in the channels that seem most promising</li><li>Find the most dominant channel in terms of customer acquisition</li><li>Have an explicit traction goal that you are working towards</li></ul>PublicityStart small. Focus on small sites especially if you want large media outlets to find your story.

Bullseye

<ul><li>Use search engine ads to test the right product positioning and messaging</li><li>Don’t expect early profit</li><li>Measure conversion so you can test SEM variables against profitability</li><li>Longer keywords are better than short ones</li><li>Monitor ad quality scores to get better placement</li></ul>Offline AdvertisingTV ads, billboards, direct mail, radio

Search Engine Marketing

Create short free courses that are geared towards educating potential customers about the product, or your problem space.A popular approach is to create a sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new customers to the key features in your product.For example, you could email them five days after they've signed up and say, "Hey, did you know we have this feature?"

Email Lists

Ask Situation questions. These questions will help you understand the prospect’s buying situation. An example of a situation question is how is your organization structured?Problem questions.  These kinds of questions clarify the buyer’s pain pointsImplication questions. These kinds of questions are meant to make the prospect aware of why they need to solve the problem they are facing ASAP.Need-payoff questions. These kinds of questions get the buyers thinking of the benefits of solving their problem

Sales Strategy(SPIN)

A viral loop is a three-step process in its most basic form:A customer is exposed to a product or serviceThe customer shares the message with someone elseSome portion of the people exposed become your customers as wellEngineering As MarketingBuilding useful tools and resources in a way that attracts customers

Viral Marketing Strategy

Business development involves exchanging value through partnerships.<ul><li>Standard partnerships. Two companies work together to work on one or both their products</li><li>Joint ventures. In joint ventures, two companies work together to create a new product</li><li>Licensing. Happens when companies charge a fee to anyone using their brand</li><li>Distribution deals. Distribution deals work when one company provides a distribution channel to another company</li><li>Supply chain partnerships.  Connections help secure key inputs that are essential for certain products.</li></ul>

Business Development

<ul><li>Targeting blogs</li><li>Publicity</li><li>Unconventional PR</li><li>Search Engine Marketing</li><li>Social and Display ads</li><li>SEO</li><li>Content marketing</li><li>Email Marketing</li><li>Engineering as marketing.</li><li>Viral marketing.</li><li>Business development.</li><li>Sales. </li><li>Affiliate programs</li><li>Existing platforms. </li><li>Trade Shows. </li><li>Offline Events.</li><li>Speaking engagements. </li><li>Community building. </li></ul>

Traction Channels

Traction shares secrets of what makes some startups experience massive growth while others die out. They identify 19 traction channels that can lift any startup to stardom.

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Smart entrepreneurs know 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 (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path. Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You’ll learn, for example, how to: ·Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using ·Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers ·Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates ·Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research Weinberg and Mares know that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

startup

Startups

books

Books

product

Product & Design

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction.  Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely.   As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.   Smart entrepreneurs know 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 (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path. Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You’ll learn, for example, how to:   ·Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using ·Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers ·Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates ·Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research Weinberg and Mares know that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

Since 2008, I've been the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. Our private search engine is #4 in the U.S., Germany, Australia and dozens of other countries, answering over 9 billion queries in 2018.I also co-authored Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models (Penguin Portfolio, 2019). Previously I co-authored Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth (Penguin Portfolio, 2015). Before DuckDuckGo, I founded other Internet-related companies. My formal education is from MIT (B.S. Physics, '97-01; M.S. from the Technology and Policy Program '03-05).

Gabriel Weinberg

Justin is the co-author of Traction Book: a Startup Guide to Getting Customers. Before writing the book, he ran growth at developer tools company Exceptional Cloud Services, which was acquired by Rackspace in 2013. Previously, he also co-founded a 3D printing company that was acquired in late 2011, and has consulted for startups and some of the most popular websites on the internet. He's also an active mentor at 500 Startups, a seed-stage investment fund and accelerator. 

Traction Thinking

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