Traction

Your goal in designing these invitations is to get potential customers to engage with the invite and follow the link (or take the next step) that the invitation contains. Invitations that work best are short and succinct. Sign up for the most viral services you can think of and you’ll see what we mean. Additionally, personal hooks really help.

I’ll bet you a lot of your competition will refuse to even try these channels. And if that’s true, that’s even more reason to go try those channels! It can almost be a competitive advantage (at least a temporary one) if you can acquire customers in channels that others cannot, or refuse to try. That’s more interesting than duking it out with AdWord

The third and final step in Bullseye is to focus solely on the channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel.

now have data from all the tests you just did, which will inform you as to what types of things are, and are not, resonating with customers. Look at the messaging you’ve been using, or dig deeper to see at what point each channel failed to deliver customers.

DEFINING YOUR TRACTION GOAL You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working toward. This could be one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers, or 10 percent of your market.

These first channel strategy tests are often very cheap and short. For instance, if you spend just $250 on AdWords, you’ll get a rough idea of how well the search engine marketing channel works for your business. In general in phase I, you shouldn’t be spending more than a thousand dollars and a month’s time on a middle ring test, and often signifi

One way to find the best offline places to advertise is to ask your target customers. What magazines do they read, or radio stations do they listen to? Where do they see ads they actually remember?

First focus on changes that, if they worked, would result in a 5–10x improvement in a key metric. This could be something like an entirely new email auto-responder sequence, a new Web site design, or a new onboarding flow. Once you’ve made big changes, then optimize the smaller stuff.

The traction channel that will ultimately succeed is unpredictable, and time is of the essence. That’s why we focus on successive rounds of quick parallel tests. It’s simple and it works.