Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth Kindle Edition

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.

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.

As a serial entrepreneur, I have found marketing issues to always be a crap shoot. Often it has been like throwing money down a drain. TRACTION provides clarity on a number of issues and I look forward to deploying these new tactics soon on yet another startup called HOT FLASH CATCHER.

This book is all about helping a startup build its marketing mix. It gives you a bird eye view of the channels you should consider and shares a suggested framework to test these channels. I would say that the most important lesson is that you might find traction in unexpected channels. So, it’s important to be creative and test every idea. I consider this book a must read for tech entrepreneurs.

Traction provides a great structure to evaluating the wide array of potential avenues for marketing and increasing a customer base and, if done properly, increasing revenues along the way. Traction serves as a great guide to help you consider all the options, narrow them down to what may work for you and then targeting the few that you think will work best. This book is a fairly quick ready and will help structure the process of deciding where to spend your time and money to get and keep more customers.

Very valuable language and framework for understanding the big picture when it comes to marketing.

My chief complaint is that the explanations are a bit simplistic and give the impression that certain channels are easier to use than is the reality.

Traction gives you an overview of multiple ways a start-up can grow its initial customer base. Starting with popular online channels like SEO, and search engine marketing (AdWords) to inbound marketing, to engineering as marketing (microsites, free tools) to offline events.

I thought the information was very educational. Made me think about different areas of marketing that I had not thought about before or how to approach them in a meaningful way. I also enjoyed learning about success stories in the different areas discussed throughout the book. My perspective Regarding why I only scored it three out of five was the pie in the sky application. I will be using many of the techniques to figure out my best areas of traction.