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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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TRACTION

Justin Mares Gabriel Weinberg

How Any Startup Can Achieve Rapid 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.

Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine that doesn’t track searches and emphasizes users’ privacy. It received over one billion searches in 2013 and is growing rapidly.

Justin Mares is the founder of two startups and former Director of Revenue at Exceptional, a software company that was acquired by Rackspace in 2013.
Available products
Book

Published 2015-10-01 by Portfolio

Book

Published 2015-10-01 by Portfolio

Comments

Japanese: O’Reilly Media, Chinese (sc) rights to CITIC Press, UK rights to Penguin UK, Thai rights to WeLearn

Traction is a critical guide for entrepreneurs looking to grow and scale their businesses.

This is a must-have, essential book if you want to be good at growth.

Traction belongs on every startup founder’s bookshelf. I’m buying copies for the CEOs of my current Angel Investments.

I’ve read quite a few books about startups over the years, and apparently this was the only one worth keeping.

Traction is an absolute must. The Bullseye Framework Gabe and Justin layout is probably the greatest tool in my catalog over the past year. Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur or just getting started, Traction offers a framework that creates efficiency, clarity, and focus. With startups as crazy as they are, I strongly encourage you to take the time to make your life a little easier. Traction is equal to and should be read alongside The Lean Startup.