Traction Loop
“You should focus on one product and keep building that”.
This is the advice I got from a lot of people who I know. Traction Loop is a new marketing concept I have tried out, which is the opposite of the above statement. It was a very successful experience. Before talking about the Traction Loop, let me give you some background information.
MeteorHacks
I am running a small startup called MeteorHacks from a small country called Sri Lanka. We help Meteor developers to write better quality applications. As part of that, we do a lot of open source projects, articles and so on.
We also maintains a performance monitoring service for Meteor called Kadira. It’s something like New Relic but specifically built for Meteor.
The Issue
We are a bootstrapped company and we don’t have any funding. In other words, we don’t have the luxury of getting some good funding.
I live in a country where it’s nearly impossible to get an US tourist visa for an average guy like me. So, you can think about the story of funding.
Our only revenue model is from Kadira. Kadira has a quite impressive number of user base. But we don’t have many number of paying customers. That’s very logical since most of the meteor apps are startups or in the early stages.
We also believe everyone should get the benefit of Kadira whether they can afford to pay or not. That’s why we offer a very generous “forever free” plan.
So, we had to face an issue when our bank account starting to reach zero.
Spider Web Strategy
One of my friend Sacha Grief published a really great write up on Spider Web Strategy. It shows how to use a set of free products and services to gain traction for one core product.
We used a similar approach from the day one with our open source projects and articles. That’s how meteor community started to know about MeteorHacks and Kadira.
Now we desperately needed some new revenue stream to maintain our day to day operations and pay salaries. (We are a team of three). SpiderWeb is not working for us. It helps us to get more users and that’s great. But it didn’t help to grow our revenue in the short term. Most of our users still building their products/apps. So they are not in a state to purchase services like Kadira.
Kadira is a performance monitoring solution, which identify a lot of performance issues in production apps. Early stage apps may also get some benefits, but not much like production apps.
Therefore we had to think more about our revenue streams.
BulletProof Meteor
We already knew education business has a lot of potential in the Meteor community with the success of Discover Meteor book.
So, we decided to enter into this market. But that’s a very different business compared to our original business with Kadira. A lot of my friends have advised me to not to go into that. But we didn’t have any choice.
After few weeks, we launched Bulletproof Meteor.
It’s an online course which shows meteor developers to build high quality production apps. It’s very practical and based on our experience in working with many meteor developers and their apps.
It has both free and paid lessons.
Traction Loop
Rather than just publishing an online course, we did something interesting. In the free section of BulletProof Meteor, we include few lessons which suggests readers to use Kadira. Actually, Kadira helps them to understand the concept very clearly. So it is not just a marketing strategy.
Then we used all our traction channels to get users into BulletProof Meteor. We also asked our existing kadira users to try out Bulletproof Meteor too. This is how it’s looks like now:
- Now all our traction channels drive users into both BulletProof Meteor and Kadira
- BulletProof Meteor also drive users into Kadira
- Kadira also drive users into BulletProof Meteor
This is what I like to name as the “Traction Loop”.
Success
Fortunately, this was a pretty big success. BulletProof Meteor helps us to cover our costs for day to day operations while Kadira got a lot of new users. Most importantly, most of those new users have upgraded Kadira’s paid plans.
So, Traction Loop is something that really works if products in the loop are related in some way. I might not be the first one to try out something like this, but to my experience this is something that really works. Most importantly by implementing a Traction Loop, we could grow all the products inside the loop rapidly compared with if they lives outside the loop.
Give it a try with your product and it will work for sure.
