Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
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.
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
TARGETS Work through Bullseye. Maximize your chances of getting traction: brainstorm, prioritize, test, and then focus. Do not overlook underutilized channels. In fact, those channels are more likely to be the ones that will work best. Talk to founders a few steps ahead of you. Research how past and present companies in your space and adjacent spac... See more
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
As Paul Graham said in his essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale”: A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off becau... See more
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
An untapped channel strategy may mean trying something different in an established venue, but it also could mean trying a venue no one else is using. For example, you might be able to take advantage of new marketing platforms while they are still in their infancy. Zynga (the maker of FarmVille and other games) did this with Facebook, dominating its
... See moreGabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Before you can set about getting traction, you have to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. At the earliest stages, this traction goal is usually to get enough traction to either raise funding or become profitable. In any case, you should figure out what this goal means in terms of hard numbers. How many cus
... See moreGabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
TARGETS Put half your efforts into getting traction. Pursue traction and product development in parallel, and spend equal time on both. Think of your product as a leaky bucket. Your early traction efforts are pointing you toward the holes worth plugging. Set your growth goals. Focus on strategies and tactics that can plausibly move the needle for y... See more
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it: [You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral... See more
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
For each channel, you should identify one decent channel strategy that has a chance of moving the needle.
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Inner ring tests are designed to do two things. First, to optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be. Second, to uncover better channel strategies within this traction channel.
Gabriel Weinberg • Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it: [You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral
... See more