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 19 channels you can use to build a customer base and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on interviews with more than 40 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 19 traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business.

Listening Length

7 hours and 24 minutes
Author

Gabriel Weinberg, see all
Narrator

Gabriel Weinberg
Audible release date

October 23, 2015
Language

English
Publisher

Gildan Media, LLC
ASIN

B01705KMG4
Version

Unabridged
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Audiobook
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Name: Amazon.com: Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth &#40;Audible Audio Edition&#41;: Gabriel Weinberg, Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares, Gildan Media, LLC: Books
Rating: 4.5 (1763 reviews)

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Product details

Listening Length	7 hours and 24 minutes
Author	Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
Narrator	Gabriel Weinberg
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	October 23, 2015
Publisher	Gildan Media, LLC
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B01705KMG4
Best Sellers Rank	#10,097 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #10 in New Business Enterprises #42 in Marketing (Audible Books & Originals) #61 in Small Business (Books)

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4.5 out of 5

1,763 global ratings

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Magnus

Great simple and practical book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 6, 2023

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Although the authors failed to go deeply into each traction channels, it provides enough guidance to start testing each of them and find which one works

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Excellent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 11, 2022

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This is an excellent book, well set out and very easy to read. A great summary of the avenues that are open to everyone who wants to grow their business whether you are a start up or a more mature business. This book is particularly useful for old schoolers like me who have had their head in the sand in regard to the huge web based opportunities that have changed so much over the last 10-15 years. I highly recommend this book.

3 people found this helpful

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Louis

Detailed critique: Doesn't live up to the ratings that it's gotten

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 18, 2023

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There are a number of things that I like about “Traction”. But ultimately I think that its bullseye testing process makes no sense, and their single-channel approach is going to limit the potential growth of many startups.

BTW, I don’t trash “Traction” because I have a marketing book; there are *many* other useful marketing books out there. But “Traction” isn’t among them, IMHO.

The second edition of my award-winning “Bullseye Marketing” book is available here.
https://www.amazon.com/Bullseye-Marketing-Grow-Business-Faster-ebook/dp/B0BXQNGH6K/

Detailed critique of “Traction” follows:

First, the good news: “Traction” is chock full of ideas/stories of how some successful startups dramatically ramped up their sales and revenue. My suggestion is that you not think about copying these tactics, but do be inspired by them to come up with even better ones for your company.

Second, the authors suggest that you don’t just use the tried-and-true strategies for an industry. Be contrarian; see how you can exploit the marketing channels (what they call “traction channels”) that others in that industry are ignoring. Indeed, I have had some of my greatest successes as a fractional CMO when it was my first time working in an industry and I was coming in with a fresh perspective rather than following the established industry playbook.

And while dated (in 2023) in the details (15 cent ppc clicks, for example), their explanations of how to implement the various channels are very solid.

No now for the problems.

Problems with Traction’s Bullseye framework

Their Bullseye framework is a decision-making framework: In the outer ring, you put all 19 of their “traction channels”, research them in-depth, and decide on three or four to move into the middle ring for testing. After only a month of testing the channels, while spending under $1,000 ($1,269 in today’s dollars), you decide which single channel will work best for you, and put that one channel into the center of the Bullseye to use.

A month is a shockingly short amount of time to test. As they note in their “Viral Marketing” chapter, “assume one to three out of every ten [A/B tests] will yield positive results.” It can take a lot longer than a month for a startup to have statistically-significant results or find a profitable channel. Many successful startups initially hone their offering, messaging, and marketing over months or even a few years to achieve product-market fit in one city or geo before attempting to go national. Uber’s initial service was providing a black, luxury car; it was over a year later that they switched to their taxi-like service with drivers using their own cars.

The authors want you to find The One traction channel that will provide the fastest growth for your startups. And they repeat, over and over, that it is one. Like an irresponsible farmer who over-farms the land, they advise you to “focus on the most promising [traction channel] until it stopped working.” Then you determine the next most successful channel and drive that into the ground.

They even say that, “The way this step gets most often messed up by founders is by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other traction channels.” You may use other channels in support of that one, but that’s it.

A major, major problem with the Traction testing process is that you can’t separate the testing of a channel from the execution. Let’s say that you decide to test email marketing, send out four emails in that month, and don’t get much of a response. That doesn’t mean that email marketing can’t be a great channel for you; you may simply have sent out four, poorly crafted emails. As they say in their chapter on email marketing, “An email campaign can go from a waste of time to wildly profitable just by tweaking a few words and headlines.” Exactly.

It often takes a startup months, and many campaigns, to figure out what messaging and offers will be most effective for it.

Here’s the dark side of this approach, which I’ve seen. The company tests a few channels for a few weeks, finds one that is hot, and says, “That’s it! That’s our Bullseye channel!” And so they go all-in on that channel, and the next month that channel doesn’t run so hot. It’s meh, at best. So, understanding that they need one superhero channel, they jump to the second best channel in the tests. And when that isn’t up to their expectations, they quickly abandon that (after all, it can’t be a failure of execution, it must be the channel), and so on, leaving behind a trail of channels that were given up on too quickly. I know that we expect instant gratification, but some excellent channels take more than a month to produce results.

And as someone who plays too much poker, I have a much more intuitive understanding of probabilities and improbabilities than before. I know how big a role variance can play, how players (regardless of skill) can run very hot or very cold over hundreds of hands, and how misleading statistically-insignificant data can be.

They treat all channels as worthy of equal, early-stage consideration. But experience shows that for most companies some channels, like email, are inexpensive/virtually free and often produce swift results while others, like display ads, are expensive and usually take several months to a few years to produce results.

And B2B companies may be able to secure technology partners early on, but sales partners will rarely sign on until you have meaningful traction and know how to sell the product yourself.

Occasionally, the Traction authors break character and say something like, “This channel could benefit from using these five other channels with it,” And in their chapter on engineering as marketing, they write, “HubSpot, a marketing automation software company, has reached tens of millions in revenue in a few short years. One key to its success is a free marketing review tool the company created called Marketing Grader.” “One key”?? I thought one was all that it takes. The leadership of HubSpot was smart enough to use several; they were best known for their use of content marketing, which they called “inbound”, but also used paid ads, SEO, email, inside sales, partners, PR, and other channels.

Nonetheless, in general the authors heavily push their one-channel approach.

(The authors of Traction say it is for all startups -- B2B and B2C. In reality, their book is heavily slanted toward B2C companies; probably 70-80% of the examples are B2C companies such as Zappos, Uber, Groupon, and Warby Parker, and it includes many other casual mentions of industries like shoes and t-shirts and dating.)

Use multi-channel marketing instead

The Traction authors simply don’t understand the importance of multi-channel marketing, even for startups.

I am an explicit proponent of multi-channel marketing, as I explain in my book. Why? Because it works better. It’s generally understood by marketing professionals that marketing programs are most effective when you’re using at least four-to-six or more marketing channels. Our customers are in many places, and we have to reach them in many places with many messages. Quite simply, in multi-channel marketing the channels reinforce and build on one another. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Global analytics firm SAS says, “Multichannel customers spend three to four times more than single-channel customers do.”

My own study of 85 SaaS companies found that those with robust, multi-channel programs grew almost five times faster than those using just one or two channels.

When you’re doing multi-channel marketing, you’ll find that there isn’t just one effective channel -- the best source of your leads will vary from month to month. One month the best source of qualified leads may be email, the next month social media ads, then webinars, then PR, etc. But the point is that the program is working, not just one superhero channel.

Startups need brand marketing, too

The “Traction” authors also don’t understand how important building a startup brand is. A strong brand allows you to charge more, have higher margins, have more loyal customers, and much more. It also makes your short-term leadgen programs (“traction channels”) more successful.

As I write in Bullseye Marketing:

This is as true for startups and SMBs as it is for Fortune 500 companies. Jaleh Rezaei, who was the CMO of Gusto when it grew from 500 to 50,000 customers, and is now the CEO of marketing AI startup Mutiny, wrote in 2023:
Brand awareness lowers CAC [Customer Acquisition Cost].
I suggest always having some brand spend. Measure it on awareness within your TAM [Total Addressable Market], not acquisition.
Even my award winning brand campaigns [at Gusto] were 30-50x less efficient at acquiring customers than traditional performance mktg (ads, FB). But when I turned off brand spend, 6 mo later CPCs & CAC shot up, conversions & organic tanked.
10-20% of mktg program budget (1-2% of new ARR) is the bare minimum I’d spend on brand. (Program budget is ~40% of overall mktg budget, which is ~40-50% of new ARR)

Ad agency veteran, successful startup CMO, and VC Mike Troiano has said, “I think the biggest advantage the West Coast has to the East Coast is that VCs out there tend to understand the value of leading with brand, rather than with demand gen alone.”

Maybe those Traction channels wouldn’t be exhausted so quickly, or ever, if they had gotten better multi-channel and brand support.

Does the “Traction” single-channel strategy work?

But does the single-channel “Traction” strategy work? No doubt for the startups mentioned, it did. They were lucky and stumbled upon a profitable channel reportedly very quickly, or the founders came into the enterprise with a good idea of how they could reach some customers. (Or, like HubSpot, they actually were using multiple channels all along,) For example, they say that “within six months of launching, [Mint] had 1 million users,” largely from “publicity” (after burning out blog sponsorships). “Users”? Were they paying customers? “Eyeballs” were a big deal in 2007, but today it’s all about paying customers.

But every company is just one data point, so we can’t say how much better those Traction success cases might have done if they had used multi-channel and brand marketing, too.

Their book’s title could be Traction: Survivorship Bias. The authors are basing the strategy on a small set of successful startups without looking at how many startups couldn’t find that one, superhero channel, and whether a similar, single-channel strategy was unsuccessful for many other startups.

The differences between their approach and mine are significant, as are the differences between the books. The Traction authors tell, but they don’t show; there is only one illustration in the book: Noah Kagan’s test results spreadsheet from Mint in 2007. My Bullseye Marketing has over 100 full-color graphics, including many examples of excellent, creative B2B marketing. I even supplement the chapter on video by including a web page with excellent B2B marketing videos.

You don’t need to believe me. Bullseye Marketing has gotten great reviews and endorsements, as you can see on the Amazon book page. You can get my “Bullseye Marketing on Amazon”.
https://www.amazon.com/Bullseye-Marketing-Grow-Business-Faster-ebook/dp/B0BXQNGH6K/

Helpful

L Lipchik

Learned new things

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 7, 2022

Verified Purchase

Awesome read! I do lead generation among other things, and I have for 10 + years. With this book I spent time highlighting and earmarking and even writing quick references on the inside of the back cover while reading throughout. Great author as well. Have another book from them that is just as great of a read.

Helpful

Ruben

awesome, many good tips

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book is priceless for people who need to get more customers!
There are many good examples , and useful advices!

Helpful

Nolawill

This should be in every startup's library.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

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.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kevin Jones

Nailed Just What I Needed For My Startup

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2015

Verified Purchase

While building my startup (viaPing) I was floundering when it came to the marketing end. I knew that marketing will make or break a new business, but of all the options, what do I do? And how do I get started in each of them? I was at a point where I was stuck and with no real direction.

Now I know, and I can take action.

TRACTION nailed exactly what I needed. It is a fantastic introduction to not only a model to use and guidelines to use it, but also a ton of avenues of marketing. Each is laid out so that anyone can get started right away.

Although it is geared more toward B2C companies, my B2B company will benefit a ton from the wealth of knowledge, tactics, and stories.

6 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Nel

A great book but....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

The book covers both online and offline strategies, so for e-commerce stores, some of the content might be irrelevant. In addition, some of the content is slightly outdated and needs to be updated.

Regardless, it’s a great book for newbies or even seasoned marketers as it’s well structured and easy to follow.

Nick S

Best of it's genre, really worth the time take to read a couple of times over.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

As a startup founder looking at various marketing options it's hard to find real world examples of what works. This book is simply the best, nothing like it available at the present time. The authors have been there, done it and got the t-shirt and the number of real world examples from well known startup founders that they have interviewed is really impressive. If you are starting or have started an internet business you can't fail reading this, it really is a great read.

5 people found this helpful

Cosmin Lapovita

Best growth hacking book !

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

I wanted to lesrn more about this magical method called growth hacking this book was recommended by the head of growth at uber and i was blown away briliant must read for any entrepreneur and marketing expert ....

One person found this helpful

Craig Le

Poor Book - and it's not "Traction" by Gino Wickman.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

I bought this book by accidentally mistaking it for Traction by Gino Wickman which is a very different and much better book.

Regardless, I did read this book and felt that it was pretty poor. It's maybe useful for the first time start up tech founder but I found that much of it was only relevant to a small subset of businesses and was focused on digital trends quickly go out of date based on the speed of change.

mohsin kamal

Best Book for Startup founders.. Newbies

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 2, 2022

Verified Purchase

I am a doctor venturing into tech space, this book is like a step by step guide on various ways of marketing strategies. Very impressed and highly recommended

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