Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

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“To reiterate, the biggest mistake startups make when trying to get traction is failing to pursue traction in parallel with product development.”

That’s a great quote from a new book called Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It emphasizes something we talk a lot about in Lean Analytics–you can’t just build a product in a vacuum without early and frequent customer feedback/engagement. Early traction in Lean Analytics is about proving whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. It’s what we call “Empathy” in the book. And it goes from there through Stickiness, Virality, Revenue and Scale.

In Lean Analytics we went into some of the tactics for acquiring and engaging users/customers, but that wasn’t our full focus. In the book Traction, you’ll get all of the practical how-tos for finding the right customer acquisition (or traction) channels and frameworks for how to discover the best channels, prioritize growth and traction strategies and more.

The authors interviewed 40+ very successful entrepreneurs, marketers, investors and executives to learn the best practices on building traction for your startup.

Traction doesn’t happen by accident. Sure there’s some luck involved in everything, but in my experience it involves a lot of experimentation, iteration and grinding (read: hard work). You could throw a few things on social media, email a couple bloggers and try to get on TechCrunch…*yawn*…and the tumbleweeds will still roll on by. No one will care. The folks that win at growth are those that dig deep, try new things, learn from others, measure things (let’s not forget the analytics!) and work crazy hard. Traction, the book, will be a good guide for anyone that wants to work hard at growth.

To get you started, Gabriel and Justin sent me the first three chapters that you can download for free. Get the first 3 chapters of Traction

Or just go ahead and buy the book directly: Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers