Location 129:

most founders consider using only traction channels with which they’re already familiar, or those they think they should be using because of their type of product or company. This means that far too many startups focus on the same channels and ignore other promising ways to get traction. In fact, often the most underutilized channels in an industry are the most promising ones.

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it’s hard to predict the traction channel that will work best. You can make educated guesses, but until you start running tests, it’s difficult to tell which channel is the best one for you right now.

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Having a product or service that your early customers love, but having no clear way to get more traction is a major problem. To solve this problem, spend your time constructing your product or service and testing traction channels in parallel. Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention.

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splitting your time evenly between product and traction will certainly slow down product development. However, it counterintuitively won’t slow the time to get your product successfully to market.

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Put half your efforts into getting traction. Pursue traction and product development in parallel, and spend equal time on both. Think of your product as a leaky bucket. Your early traction efforts are pointing you toward the holes worth plugging.

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Set your growth goals. Focus on strategies and tactics that can plausibly move the needle for your company. Get some hard numbers.

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Learn what growth numbers potential investors respect. How much traction is needed for investors is a moving target, but a sustainable customer growth rate is hard for investors to ignore. Potential investors who understand your business are likely to appreciate your traction and thus invest earlier.

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Find your bright spots. If you’re not seeing the traction you want, look for bright spots in your customer base, pockets of customers who are truly engaged with your product. See if you can figure out why it works for them and if you can expand from that base. If there are no bright spots, it may be a good time to pivot.

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The biggest mistake startups make when trying to get traction is failing to pursue traction in parallel with product development.

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You are much more likely to develop a good distribution strategy with a good traction development methodology (like Bullseye) the same way you are much more likely to develop a good product with a good product development methodology (like Lean). Both help address major risks that face early-stage companies: market risk (that you can reach customers in a sustainable way) and product risk (that customers want what you’re building).

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Look for customers where others aren’t looking. Keep a lookout for the cutting-edge tactics that haven’t yet succumbed to the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs. Run cheap tests to quickly validate assumptions and test new ideas.

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Keep it numerical. Look for ways to quantify your marketing efforts, especially when deciding which traction strategies to pursue and comparing them within Bullseye. You should have an idea at all times of what numbers it will take to move the needle, and focus your traction efforts only on strategies that could possibly do so.

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The right goal is highly dependent on your business. It should be chosen carefully and align with your company strategy. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome. Perhaps you’d be profitable, be able to raise money more easily, or become the market leader.

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The importance of choosing the right traction goal cannot be overstated. Are you going for growth or profitability, or something in between? If you need to raise money in X months, what traction do you need to show to do so?

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The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path. You should literally enumerate the intermediate steps (milestones) to get to your traction goal. These milestones need not be traction related, but they should be absolutely necessary to reach your goal.

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In your company, your milestones will be different, but the point is to be critical and strategic in deciding what to include. That’s why it is called the Critical Path. For example, you may think that to reach your traction goal you will need to hire three people, add features A, B, and C to your product, and engage in marketing activities X, Y, and Z. These are the milestones you need to do to get where you want to go.

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Critical Path is a framework to help you decide what not to do. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your Critical Path.

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Lay out your milestones. Determine your traction goal and define your Critical Path against that goal, working backward and enumerating the absolutely necessary milestones you need to achieve to get there.

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Stay on the Critical Path. Assess every activity you do against your Critical Path and consistently reassess it. Building such assessment into your management processes is a good idea. Quantify traction subgoals and put them on a calendar so you can properly monitor your progress over time.

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Actively work to overcome your traction channel biases. Being on the cutting edge of the right traction channel can make a huge difference in success. Which traction channels do you know most about? Which traction channels do you know least about? Mentors can help here.

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Focus on the right smaller sites. Press stories often “filter up,” meaning major news outlets are often looking to major blogs for story ideas, which in turn are looking at smaller blogs and forums. That means if you can generate buzz on those sites, you can increase your chances of getting picked up by bigger publications.

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Build real relationships with the specific reporters covering your startup’s market. Read what they write, comment, offer them industry expertise, and follow them on Twitter.

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Have newsworthy milestones to share. Contact reporters only when you can package your milestones into a compelling emotional story. When you do make a pitch, keep it short and sweet!

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Do something big, cheap, fun, and original. A publicity stunt is anything that is engineered to generate a large amount of media coverage. They are often hard to do consistently well, but just one well-executed stunt can move the needle for your company. Publicity stunts need to be creative and extraordinary to succeed. Some types that have been successful repeatedly are competitive stunts and viral videos.

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Be awesome to your customers and good things follow. Common ways to do customer appreciation well are through gifts, contests, and amazing customer support. Excelling in this area is a way to do unconventional PR over a longer period of time.

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You should have a defined process for brainstorming and selecting ideas, but also understand that not every idea will work.

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Paid is fundamentally only as good as the content you put behind it. And content is only as good as how many people actually see it.

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You should only employ social advertising dollars when you’ve understood that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it. Getting that spark started is based on what you’re trying to say: startups do the opposite of this all the time where they waste tens of thousands of dollars trying to push a message that nobody cares about.