Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

idea. It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. 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. So it’s worth thinking

It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure.

traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup.

“At Marketo, not only did we have SEO [Search Engine Optimization] in place even before product development, we also had a blog. We talked about the problems we aimed to solve… Instead of beta testing a product, we beta tested an idea and integrated the feedback we received from our readers early on in our product development process.

You want to design smaller scale tests that don’t require much upfront cost or effort.

Having a product your early customers love but no clear way to get more traction is frustrating. To address this frustration, spend your time building product and testing traction channels – in parallel

You should always have a traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers, 100 new daily users, or 10% of your market.

Many entrepreneurs think that if you build a killer product, your customers will beat a path to your door. We call this line of thinking The Product Trap: the fallacy that the best use of your time is always improving your product. In other words, “if you build it, they will come” is wrong.

founders build something people want by following a sound product development strategy. They spend their time building new features based on what early users say they want. Then, when they think they are ready, they launch, take stabs at getting more users, only to become frustrated when customers don’t flock to them.

However, to get to the next traction goal they had to get more mainstream adoption and this next set of users is much less forgiving.