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Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth |  |
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Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth | |
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 nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty 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 nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.
网友对Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth的评论
很不错！非常务实的实战经验
I was outlining a book proposal when I found "Traction." My proposal first explained that product development gets easier, faster, and cheaper every year, so startups no longer fail because they can't build their product. Instead, startups fail when they hit the marketing wall.
According to The Economist (2014 Sep 13), "marketers say they have seen more change in the past two years than in the previous 50."
According to the Harvard Business Review (2014 July-August, p. 56) "In the past decade, what marketers do to engage customers has changed almost beyond recognition....we can't think of another discipline that has evolved so quickly."
It can seem like marketing is getting harder each year, but actually in some ways it's getting easier and cheaper, e.g., Facebook's targeted ads. What's needed is a guide to how marketing is changing.
Unlike the zillions of e-books about Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, etc., my book would cover and compare all marketing channels. Unlike the e-books, my book would include case studies of real companies. Unlike the marketing textbooks, my book would focus on tech startups, not on dog treat bakeries and corner grocery stores. Unlike the books that say you'll get rich if you follow their formula, my book would say that marketing is changing rapidly now, and the marketing plan that worked even a few years ago won't work now. I proposed teaching entrepreneurs instead to make small-scale experiments, see what works and what doesn't, and continuously evolve their marketing.
I scrapped my book proposal because "Traction" is that book.
There are some things I would add (and perhaps Weinberg and Mares will in a second edition). My proposal included case studies of both success and failure. "Traction" only has successful case studies, leading to a sense that every marketing strategy leads to success. Including both successes and failures would lead to a framework for what channels work for what types of companies. E.g., viral social media likes may work for a microbrewery, but not for colonoscopies!
Points I like about "Traction":
- Entrepreneurs should spend 50% of their time on product development and 50% on marketing, but product development sucks up all your time. It's more satisfying to add a new feature to your product than to spend your limited capital on a marketing test that completely fails. We feel comfortable developing our products but feel clueless marketing them.
- Integration with Lean Startup. That was the book I proposed a few years ago, and Eric Reis beat me to it!
- How much traction (downloads, press coverage, sales) investors want to see before they invest increases every year, as marketing gets faster and cheaper to some startups.
- Every entrepreneur has to hand sell the first few customers.
- Building a viral marketing campaign will take one or two engineers three to six months! I.e., viral marketing doesn't magically happen just because your product is so cool.
Stuff that's missing:
- Celebrity endorsements is a 20th channel.
- A chapter about market research, e.g., why you should ask open-ended questions instead of closed-ended questions.
- The PR chapter needs a section on finding journalist contacts, se.g., whether to use the Meltwater or Cision databases.
- Tradeshows are about having outgoing, enthusiastic salespeople, not about having a flashy booth.
The book puts all the emphasis on the different 20 traction channels and how to take advantage of them, but the reader is left sorely wanting for more discussion (beyond terse mentions) of how to actually brainstorm the right channel, then choose a traction channel and how to grow a business's traction over time.
The actual growth of my marketing through traction is what I expected & the stages of growth I should expect. Unfortunately, what I got was a laundry list of things I could probably google.
The book chapter layout was opposite of what it should have been: it should have had 20 chapters of material on how to develop my business from 1 client to 1 million clients, outlining the different challenges during each stage of growth & then 1-2 chapters on all the different traction channels & how to implement them.
Perhaps this should have been 2 books, one simple discussing growth in stages & one about traction channels? I was frustrated by the lack of a single path.
I know there is no one path, but I expect at least one laid out initially for me all the way from failure to success to relate to, before discussing the options I have. It would make it easier to understand the rest of the book.
That said, the book's commitment to traction is tremendous & I massively appreciate the new inquiries that this book has created in the world. This is a rich discussion & more people should be paying attention to this topic. Thank you for speaking up!
This should be in every startup's library. I'm a young entrepreneur/designer very involved in the startup community where I'm at, with experience going through accelerators, working with startup companies, partnered in a couple myself, so I've seen the landscape and where the challenges are. This book is so helpful at just cutting right to one of the core challenges in starting a company - growth. It delivers on exactly what it says - defining how you can get traction. It almost seems simple after reading this book. The amount of clarity and actionable guidance in this book is incredible. Very motivating to me, especially being in a couple startups. One of the great things about it is their whole approach to this challenge - there's no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. The framework outlined in the book really helps you figure out what the right traction channel is for YOU. It's really a moving target and I've never seen it more clearly defined than in this book. The amount of research and interviews is impressive. I highly recommend it and would say every accelerator, university, startup needs to have this book in their library and reference it often.
I've been head of marketing and strategy for startups and interesting brands for several years, and this was the first book I've ever read that is actually useful and something I frequently reference in channel, strategy and overall marketing brainstorming sessions. Why? Because it provides a comprehensive view of contemporary best-practices in marketing, without all the old baggage and fluff to which many marketers still cling. Today's marketing means you're actually responsible for revenue. If you're still doing the kind of marketing that focuses on activity and top-of-funnel vanity metrics (like how many unsuspecting tradeshow attendee badges you zapped thanks to your TV giveaway, or passing a huge seemingly impressive number of crappy MQLs to sales so you can hit your quotas), then please don't waste your time reading this. You won't get it, or you work somewhere where you can't actually apply this learning due to all the internal risk-adverse forces working against you. For everyone else who believes in the new of ways of marketing (basically, marketing without all the BS), this book and others in the series should be in your e-reader or physically sitting next to your laptop right now.
Traction was extremely helpful for me as a budding entrepreneur and author. In the book, Weinberg and Mares lay out 19 different "traction channels" everyone looking for their next client should consider. Furthermore, they challenge you to give a hard look to some of the channels you would normally dismiss without a second thought. Why? Sometimes the channel you least thought would work turns out to be highly effective.
Something I appreciated about this book was how much objective research went into it. The list of traction channels wasn't something they pulled out of their backside, but rather something that resulted from extensive interviews with entrepreneurs and business people who have experienced real-life success with them.
The only reason I didn't give Traction five stars is because many of the sections lacked the practical advice needed to put these strategies into action. To that extent, I felt like it left me hanging in quite a few areas. Not every reader is going to know who to contact for a PR campaign, how to get started with SEO, or the best way to setup a sales process/team. If you are looking for very specific information like this, realize that this book won't deliver it to you.
Now to be fair - each of the 19 channels probably deserves its own book to describe such detail, and I don't think this book was intended to be an encyclopedic guide to implementing every channel. This book was surely intended to be more of a top-level overview. To that end, it was great for calibrating one's understanding (from a leadership/executive perspective) of each channel. It inspired me to think outside the box with my own business and projects, and I still found a lot of value in it.
Anyone new to the startup world or who plans to start their own business deserves to read this book - and probably also the Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Some have said Traction and the Lean Startup go hand-in-hand, with Traction focusing more on customer acquisition and Lean Startup focusing more on product development. The build-measure-learn concept is present in each, however, and is a clear theme for all new business owners.
Once again, would certainly recommend to anyone new to the startup world or entrepreneurship. It's a quick and easy read with many good ideas.
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