Traction

How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

By: Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Narrated by: Gabriel Weinberg

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 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, 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 19 traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business.

©2015 Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares (P)2015 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"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)

Awesome guide for Start-up.

It is packed with information that you won't acces otherwise. A must hear/read for all founder and marketing expert.

Great information but author very robotic as reader

Lots of fantastic information and traction ideas. I’ll be using many of the insights from Traction as look to grow my DTC knife company.

Great Guide for Lean Startups

I liked the clarity of the book and the lack of generic hype and buzz words. Very linear and easy to follow with enough detail to help create actionable plans. I liked the book so much I had our whole eight-member team download it to discuss at our next offsite. Highly recommend for startup founders!

Review from a marketing pro

Any additional comments?

Well written book with a terrific narration by the author, which is always a big plus. Its not ground breaking or eye opening, instead it puts things in perspective.

My opinion is a little biased as I own and operate an online marketing company, so I do physically practice all of the discussed channels and my company offers them as a service. The main thing that Gabriel Weinberg does exceptionally well is offer a well structured approach and paints a solid framework. My main takeaway was communicating a holistic view of the ideal marketing mix to my team.

I highly recommend this book!

Practical, Realistic, Actionable

I think this is in need of an update as the internet moves fast and some of the references don't exist anymore (anyone remember del.ico.us?) but the concepts still hold regardless. A lot of similar books offer concepts with one or two anecdotes -- which this book does also, but it goes further explaining how to do things and often offers several examples with expert insights from several industry leaders. The audio book has some weird hickups that don't affect the info getting through but are a distraction. It's a minor quality control problem with an otherwise excellent production. The narrator reminds me of actor Randall Park who is a little unpolished which is refreshing and more real. Anyone with a startup should read this book to better understand their marketing options and how to weigh them.

This was really eye opening. Great examples!

Extremely relevant with great examples. I hope to implement these lessons myself in the near future.

Ton of value

Actionable information with no fluff. One of the best business books out there. Ton of value.

Best book for startups ever

You need to read this book now. I have both the audible and hard copy versions.

Amazing book that I can actually apply to real life

Opened my eyes up to all the possible marketing channels and how to use them as I build, grow and scale my business. Can't wait for an indepth book 2.

This will be a mandatory read to my marketing team.

I like it

Pretty good book with lots of advices and interesting cases
I’m sure will listing it again in the future