Review: Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Launching a startup is difficult. You need explosive growth to gain the scale to gather the interest of investors and make your business thrive in this tough new world. But the growth that would satisfy a typical business simply isn’t enough for most startups. To achieve the kind of growth startups need to succeed, you need something that propels you ahead at exponential speeds. Something that gives you an explosion right off the line. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth shows you how to achieve that kind of growth.

Gaining Traction

Just as a runner needs to leave the starting block with great speed right off the line, startups must now gain near-instant growth if they hope to succeed. Where the pre-Dot-Com era put the focus on sales and profits, startup success is now measured in the rate at which they’re able to grow their user base. No need to make money right now, just grow your users and you can figure out how to cash in later on. That’s the way to startup success these days.

To gain that initial growth, Traction breaks down the strategies for user acquisition into 19 different channels.

  • Targeting Blogs
  • Publicity
  • Unconventional PR
  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  • Social and Display Ads
  • Offline Ads
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Engineering as Marketing
  • Viral Marketing
  • Business Development (BD)
  • Sales
  • Affiliate Programs
  • Existing Platforms
  • Trade Shows
  • Offline Events
  • Speaking Engagements
  • Community Building

To gain the Traction needed, you don’t need to invest in numerous channels. Startups have limited resources and time. Investing in multiple areas at launch isn’t optimal or generally possible. Instead, you want to pick just one and put all your energy and resources behind it. By placing all your resources behind just one of these channels, your startup can see the greatest success from your efforts.

This isn’t to say that you won’t harness multiple channels throughout the growth of your startup or once you’ve obtained great initial growth but to begin it’s best to focus on a single channel. Later down the line you may want to invest in an additional channel or explore other channels should the first not see the success you’d hoped for.

The book dedicates a chapter to each of these channels. In addition to discussing the pros and cons to embracing each, those that have used these strategies to grow their own startups weigh in with valuable insight. Mint’s former Director of Marketing Noah Kagan, Co-Founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian, HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah, Stack Overflow Co-Founder Jeff Atwood, and others all share their advice for getting the most from strategies they used to help launch their own startups and applying them to your own.

Getting The Most From The Get-Go

The growth channels outlined in Traction can help any startup gather the critical mass needed to see success from the start. Each is presented in an easy to understand format and in a way that makes picking the optimal channel for your startup easy. In addition to the advice offered in this book, I’d suggest you do some additional reading on the specific growth area you pick for your own business.

While the options are presented in a way which would allow readers to read up only on those channels which are most attractive to them, it still makes sense to read about them all. There’s much to be learned about the channels we may not be the most familiar with and you may find that those which you hadn’t considered are a great option to help you see success at your startup.

For those looking to launch their startup and see the greatest growth possible from the start, you need a plan to get Traction. Utilizing the best-fit channels presented in this book can help achieve that initial growth, when you need it most. Grab a copy of Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth from Amazon and find your growth channel now.

Author: Ben Brausen

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