Traction

Traction is a roadmap for startups to achieve the exponential growth necessary to survive the first few months and years by looking at 19 ways to get traction and a framework to help you pick the best one for your startup.

The #1 mistake I keep seeing people make when trying to start a business is to not start marketing instantly. Every time a friend tells me “I’m building this thing…” I ask: “Have you started marketing yet?”

99% of the time, the answer is “Nah, I want to get something out first…”

As a result, most of my friends end up emerging from their startup lab with a fully cooked product, but no one who wants to buy it. Imagine a guy trying to sell newspapers on the street going “Who wants this?” That’s frustrating. So every time I get that answer, I tell them: “You have to start marketing now, or otherwise you’ll fall flat on your face.”

People rarely listen, but if they do, they usually end up thanking me. I’m sure Justin and Gabriel have had plenty of the same conversations.

They suggest you should split your time 50/50 between product development and getting traction. Of course, when you start out you’re happy if you can get a few dozen people to follow your work and you can always reach those, but the traction metric changes over time and eventually, you’ll have to get people by the thousands to buy your stuff to succeed.

Devoting lots of time to your marketing early on will allow you to test strategies until you find the right one. For example, when Dropbox tried search engine ads, they quickly realized that paying $200 to get someone to get a $99/year membership wasn’t going to work and could switch to trying something else.

Oh and don’t be afraid to share updates before you’re ready to launch. Marketo started blogging long before they had something to launch – so when they did, 14,000 people were already waiting to buy.

This is one of 19 traction channels Justin and Gabriel describe, but I picked it because it combines offline and online. No matter what industry you’re in, there are always trade shows and events not too far away, and there’s always someone there who could change your life and business. Even if you meet one of the giants in your industry before you have a finalized product to showcase, you could still get to know them, start building a relationship and who knows, maybe they’ll tell you exactly what they want from you for the two of you to partner up. You can also use these to come up with creative marketing campaigns.…