Traction Book – A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

Just purchased the audio book.

Thanks for putting out an audio book. I really wish all books were in audio form. There's so much free time where audio is possible but reading is not (driving, walking, running...).

I just finished this book the other day. Great book! As a developer, I'm usually deep in code so I'm not the best at sales and marketing. The book has great examples of what others have done to get traction. My biggest takeaway was that the book helped me get into the sales/marketing mindset which helped generate a few ideas of my own.

Awesome! Top 3 learnings are hard to pull out, but roughly:

1. Most startups fail because they can't get traction, not because they can't build a product.

2. Many startups focus too exclusively on product and ignore traction until they launch. This leads to this situation where a startup will spend 3-6 months building something, launch, and then realize they need to start marketing in order to hit profitability or raise their next round of funding. However, they're starting from square one again and with half the money they started with gone.

We talk about companies that focus on traction and product in parallel. This leads to a dynamic where companies are testing acquisition channels early on and launch to a group of beta customers. Additionally, they have a better understanding of which acquisition channels are effective, which means they can scale those channels up as after they have a more fleshed out product.

3. We found that founders and marketers have a bias towards using channels they know. Many founders never consider channels outside those they have experience with - usually Facebook/Adwords/content marketing - which means they don't acquire customers in unique ways their competition isn't. Thinking holistically about each of the 19 channels is a much better approach, and allows you to potentially acquire customers in a more cost-effective way than your competitors.

Dropbox is a great example of this. There were many file storage companies around before Dropbox, but none that used referral marketing as their main acquisition channel.

Discount for HN readers?

Great to hear it!