Traction : Guide for any startup’s growth

Arjun Sarin
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Book summary of Traction By Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, together with your and my experiences

So you have built a great product/service and figuring out ways to reach out to customers.

Distribution is one of the top challenges faced by startups and it can take your startup to its goals which can be getting funded, revenue or profitability. Like they say Traction Trumps Everything.

Source: Slide Share of Justin Mares

I have spent the last 3 years of my life building, launching and growing products, constantly wondering about ways to achieve growth. Few days back, I received an Amazon voucher from my company and decided to use it to get some reads for me. I decided to read Traction, although I was suggested to read it 2 years back by Mr. Jaimit Doshi over a conversation on Linkedin, when I was building my 2nd startup. I am reading it now as I progress on the read and reflect back on my journey, I can relate my experiences to the insights in the book and through a series of publications I would share the book summary blended with my personal experiences so that any startup can benefit.

The authors of Traction have identified and listed 19 growth channels which any startup can deploy to achieve required traction:

  1. Targeting Blogs
  2. Publicity
  3. Unconventional PR
  4. Search Engine Marketing
  5. Social and Display Ads
  6. Offline Ads
  7. Search Engine Optimization
  8. Content Marketing
  9. Email Marketing
  10. Viral Marketing
  11. Engineering as marketing
  12. Business Development
  13. Sales
  14. Affiliate Marketing
  15. Existing Platforms
  16. Trade Shows
  17. Offline Events
  18. Speaking Engagement
  19. Community Building

However before we learn about each of the channels, it important to learn about the Bulls Eye framework which the authors have presented to help deploy the right channels at the right time. The framework is briefly presented below:

Image Courtesy: Angry Ventures

The Bulls Eye is a structured process to test and deploy one core traction channel at a time until it reaches saturation after necessary optimization. There are 3 keys aspects of The Bulls Eye, which are:

  1. The Outer Ring: List all traction channels and atleast one idea in each channel which can be used, it is important not to miss any channel here owing to biases or stereotypes. This should be a list of one channel strategy in each channel considering your company and the target audience. For example if you are a Fintech company in wealth management then in the targeting blogs strategy you should focus on bloggers who write about investment advice & wealth management.
  2. The Middle Ring: In this stage you run cheap traction test on the traction channel which seem to give you the best result. You promote channels from the outer ring to the middle ring which seem most promising and run experiments on those channels to answer 3 important questions listed below.

2.1 The cost to acquire from the channel?

2.2 Total customers which can be acquired from the channel?

2.3 Are these customers the right kind of customers for your business?

The answers to above questions will determine which channels are good to move the needle for your business at this stage. These tests are meant to be small experiments which can run in parallel to each other to get relevant data and close on your core channel. Don’t make the mistake of scaling your experiments in this step. An example for a test in this stage can be if you have identified blog marketing and listed 100 blogs then working with 10 blogs to experiment is a relevant test at this stage.

3. The Inner Ring: As you finish tests in the middle ring and if all went well you would have hit bulls eye by now as one of the traction channels would have trumped all to come on top. Its time to make that channel as your core channel and focus all energies on it, As you work on one channel and dive deep in it you will uncover insights to further apply tactics to optimize and extract the maximum scale from this channel until you feel all traction which you could have got is already there and it has saturated.

If by any chance you feel that you couldn’t come up with the most optimum channel in The Middle Ring then the whole process should be repeated, the data you collected in round 1 will come in handy this time to run the process efficiently. In case you have run multiple iterations of the process and don’t find a suitable traction channel then you need to go back to your product and fix the leaks there.

In my next article I will describe how some of these channels helped me reach 2 Million users in 4 months leveraging existing platforms in a gaming startup, how I reached a revenue rate of $10,000/month through targeting blogs in my 2nd startup.

Here is a brief snapshot of my experience in startups:

  1. Engineer & Product Owner : Social Game, StreetRep— Clocked 2 Million installs worldwide in just 4 months with revenue run rate of $500/day through game currency and ads.
  2. Founder : HR Tech startup — Failed at product-market fit stage
  3. Founder : Ad Tech startup — Reached a revenue run-rate of $10,000/month in 8 months of launch
  4. Early Employee: Growth Stage SaaS product — Reached a revenue rate of $1Million ARR in 2 years.

I also invite YOU to share your experiences on how you thought and deployed the above 19 channels to fuel your company’s growth, you can share your experience by emailing me at arjunsarin99@gmail.com or by commenting here. Together we can contribute in a startup’s growth.

Please share the article with any entrepreneur or startup who you think can benefit from this.

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