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Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

by Parker · 222 things on Twos

The right traction channel is often an underutilized one
19 traction channels:
Target niche blogs
Targeting blogs prospective customers read is one of the most effective ways to get your first wave of customers
Search "top blogs for x" or "best x blogs"
Ask your audience what they read
Get publicity via traditional media outlets like newspapers, magazines, and TV
Get publicity in traditional media like news outlets, newspapers, and magazines and unconventional PR like stunts and contests
TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, Business Insider
The Washington Post, or The New York Times
It's better to start small when targeting big media outlets
If you tell your story right, you can create buzz around your company and capture the attention of larger sources
Email pitch
Milestones get a reporter's attention: raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier, a PR stunt, a big partnership, or a special industry report
Be succinct and clear
A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching. Furthermore, your story should ideally provoke a specific feeling in readers that makes them want to share the story with others. As Ryan said, “satisfaction is a nonviral emotion”—you want readers to do something after reading your piece, not just feel satisfied
If your pitch doesn’t draw a line in the sand—with some people shaking their heads and some people nodding—it won’t get discussed as widely as you hope
Template email to pitch reporters
Reports prefer hearing pitches from founders than PR firms
Unconventional PR involves doing something exceptional like publicity stunts to draw media attention
Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but few companies focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz
A publicity stunt is anything that is engineered to get media coverage
Richard Branson is the best
Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, a travel booking site, and sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter
He did the same thing at Reddit, handing out free T-shirts and personally emailed users to thank them for spending time on the site
David Hauser send customer's skittles, home-made cookies, Starbucks gift cards, books, and handwritten notes thanking them for their business
Delight your customers with appreciation
Hipmonk holds a Mother's Day Giveaway where customers tell them why they love their mothers more than Hipmunk, receive hundreds of submissions via Twitter and send the moms of the lucky winners flowers and chocolates
Understand that not every idea will work
Search engine marketing (SEM) allows companies to advertise to consumers searching on Google and other search engines
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) = Cost per Click (CPA) / conversion percentage
Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and then test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group
Keyword research is the first core component of a strong SEM strategy
With Google's Keyword Planner, you can discover the top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours
KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu are valuable for discovering keywords your competition uses to attract customers
Long-term keywords is refining your keyword list by adding more qualifying terms to the end of each base term. They are less competitive and have lower search volumes, which make them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers
Pay close attention to your ad quality score which is largely impacted by your CTR
Test keywords, ad copy, demographic targeting, landing pages, and CPC bids
Social and display ads on popular sites like reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of other niche sites can be a powerful and scalable way to reach new customers
The largest display ad networks are Google's Display Network, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade
Niche ad networks: The Deck, BuySellAds
The goal of social ads is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line
Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product and your broader mission
You should only employ social advertising when you've understood that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it
Offline ads include TV spots, radio commercials, billboards, infomercials, newspaper and magazine ads, as well as flyers and other local advertisements
The most important factor to consider when making an offline ads purchase is demographics: location, gender, race, age, income, and occupation
Ask your target customers what they consume
Use a print or "remnant ad" buying agency such as Manhattan Media or Novus Media for discounted pricing
You can buy lists of consumer contacts or addresses
You can send out bulk mail to consumers. Be sure to include a direct ask
You'll have about 3 exciting and promising channels
You are trying to determine what channels could move the needle for your startup
You should be able to get a rough idea of a channel's effectiveness with at most a thousand dollars and a month of time
If you want to buy space on a billboard, you'll probably contact one of three companies: Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media
Blue Line Media specializes in transit advertising
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making sure your Web site shows up for key search results
Two high level strategies to choose from: fat head and long tail
Fat head (one to two word searches) make up 30% of all searches
Long tail makes up 70 percent of all searches
Keyword Planner by Google is a useful tool for measuring search volume for terms
Look at what keywords other websites are using in the home page titles and headers
Open Site Explorer examines the number of links competitors have for a given term
Search site:domain.com in a search engine to determine how many landing pages a company has
SEO comes down to two things: content and links
The more aligned your content is with the keywords it's targeting, the better it will rank
The more links you can get from credible and varying sources, the better your rankings
Ways to build links:
Publicity—reporters will link to your web site
Product—produce part of your product that people will naturally want to share
Content marketing—create content people want to read, and thus share
Reporters and people who run blogs are big social sharers
Content marketing through blogs
If you invest in content, it gets picked up by Google. People find it, they share it, and it refers customers almost indefinitely
Write about the problems facing your target customers
Infographics are shared much more than a typical blog
If what you're writing isn't useful, it doesn't matter how hard you try to spread your content on Twitter. It just won't spread
The secret to shareable content is showing readers they have a problem they didn't know about, or at least couldn't fully articulate
A solution is nice, but it's not as good for drawing in readers as showing them they've been going about some aspect of their life all wrong
Engage in any online forum where conversations are taking place about your market and do your best to contribute
Ask influential people on Twitter (mini-celebrities) and ask them for feedback on recent posts
Guest posting is one of the best methods of growing your audience
Having a strong company blog influences SEO, publicity, email marketing, targeting blogs, community building, offline events, existing platforms, and business development
Email marketing is one of the best ways to convert prospects while retaining and monetizing existing customers
Email marketing works best when it is personalized
A list of interested prospects is an asset that you can draw on for years
At the bottom of blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address
Free courses related to your area of expertise is another way to educate potential customers about your problem space and product
At the end of the course put a call to action, such as asking people to purchase your product, start a free trial, or share something with their friends
Use email to activate your customers to help them get value from your product
Create a sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new customers to key features
Instead of throwing everything at them, you can email them five days after they've signed up and say, "Hey, did you know we have this feature?"
Create the ideal experience for your users when they sign up for your trial. Create all the paths they can go down when they fail to go through the ideal experience. Have emails in place to catch them and help them get back on that ideal path
Determine the steps absolutely necessary to get value from your product
Example signup email
Provide reminders, reports, and information about how they've been using and getting value from the product
Send weekly summaries
Surprise and delight your customers
Photo sites send you pictures you took a year ago. These emails make you feel good on an emotional level, and also invite you to come back and upload more pictures
Emails explaining a premium feature a customer is missing out o can have high conversion rates
Viral marketing consists of growing your customer base by encouraging your customers to refer other customers
The viral loop:
A customer is exposed to your product or service
That customer tells a set of potential customers about your product or service
These potential customers are exposed to your product or service, and some portion become customers themselves
Network effects: the value of the network increases as more people get on it
Encouraging collaboration makes an already valuable product more valuable as you invite others
Strong network effects kick in as the service becomes a central tool around which collaboration occurs
Run as many A/B tests as you can. Best practice suggests focusing for weeks at a time on one major area (i.e. sign up conversation rate), trying everything you can think of to improve that metric, and then moving on to another metric that needs improvements
Items to test and optimize:
Button vs. text links
Location of your call to actions
Size, color, and contrast of your action buttons
Page speed
Adding images
Headlines
Site copy
Testimonials
Signs of social proof (such as pictures of happy customers, case studies, press mentions, and statistics about product usage)
Number of form fields
Allowing users to test the product before signing up
Ease of signup (Facebook Connect, Twitter login, etc.)
Length of the signup process (the shorter you can make the process, the higher your conversion percentage will be)
Use engineering resources as marketing to acquire customers
Use Marketing Grader to test your website SEO
Build tools that valuable and relevant to your core business
Building free apps is a great way to drive traffic
Business development (BD) is the process of creating strategic relationships that benefit both your startup and your partner
Focused on exchanging value through partnerships, whereas sales primarily focuses on exchanging dollars for product
Standard partnerships: two companies work together to make one or both of their products better by leveraging the unique capabilities of the other
Joint ventures: two companies work together to create an entirely new product offering
Licensing: one company has a strong brand that an upstart wants to use in a new product or service
Distribution deals: one party provides a product or service to the other in return for access to potential customers
Business development requires strategic thinking
You must have a clear understanding of your company objectives and metrics you need to hit in order to maximize your chances of success
Maintain a large list of potential partners based on company, partner type, contact person/email, size, relevance, ease of use, and then a subjective priority score
Sales is focused primarily on creating processes to directly exchange product for dollars
A lunch pitch: a single piece of paper that has five to ten bullets and perhaps a visual that helps them focus the conversation, making sure they understand the prospect's problem
Define the problem they're facing so you can focus on the implications of this problem and how your solution helps
SPIN question model:
Situation questions: learn about a prospect's buying situation
Problem questions: clarify the buyer's pain points
Are you happy with your current solution?
What problems do you face with it?
Implication questions: make the prospect aware of the implications that stem from the problem they're facing
Does this problem hurt your productivity?
Need payoff questions: focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of addressing the problem
How do you feel this solution would help you?
Whose life would improve if this problem was solved, and how?
You get your first customers by picking up the phone
Don't rule out cold calling and cold emailing
Answer the customer's questions:
“Am I sure that this is the best product?”
“Am I sure that this will work for my situation?”
“Will I get a good return on investment?”
“Will this integrate with a system I have working in place today?”
Remove blockages with free trials, demo videos, FAQs, email campaigns, references, personal demos, webinars, low introduction price
Affiliate programs help reach hundreds of thousands of customers in a cost-effective way
You pay people or companies for performing certain actions like making a sale or getting a qualified lead
The major affiliate networks are Commission Junction, ClickBank, Affiliate.com, ShareASale, PepperJam, Adknowledge, LinkShare, MobAff, Neverblue, Clickbooth, RetailMeNot
Affiliate marketing is better than pay-per-click (PPC) advertising since you get to define what the transaction or the conversion is. For PPC you pay for every click
Test using an existing affiliate network, then look at your customers since they already like you and may be more willing to sell for you
Focusing on existing platforms means focusing your growth efforts on a megaplatform like Facebook, Twitter, or the App Store, and getting some of their hundreds of millions of users to use your product
Figure out where your potential customers hang out online. Then create a strategy to target potential customers on these existing platforms
Every year there’s a new platform, new device, new something, and as somebody who’s starting a company you should consider if there’s something really cool you can do on an upcoming platform
You have to think ahead. What types of things would Apple or Google really like? What are things that, if we were to do, Apple or Google or Microsoft would be looking for? And is there a natural fit between what we do and what they would be looking for?
Some of the most successful startups grew by making bets on emerging platforms that were not yet saturated and where barriers to discovery were low. . . . Betting on new platforms means you’ll likely fail if the platform fails, but it also dramatically lowers the distribution risks described above.
Trade shows are a chance for companies in specific industries to show off their latest products
You can use this traction channel to build interest in what you’re building
As you get more established, you can use trade shows as an opportunity to make a major announcement, sell big clients, seal a partnership, or as an integral part of your sales funnel
Get the opinions of people who have exhibited at previous shows: How crowded was it? How high was the quality of attendees? Would you go again?
To prepare, make a list of key attendees you want to meet at the trade show. Then schedule meetings with them before you attend the event
Editors are your key to real press
Having a big banner that says what you do, nice-looking booth materials, business cards, and a compelling demo are the basics
Give away as many bags with your company’s name on it as possible
Sponsoring or running offline events—from small meetups to large conferences—can be a primary way to get traction
Offline events give you the opportunity to engage directly with potential customers about their problems
“I think the overarching thing for marketing is [startups] need to try more things, and fail faster and more quickly”
You can still build a business without being creative. If you don’t have creativity, you need money. You need one or the other
Leverage a speaking event, give an awesome talk, and grow your startup's profile at such speaking gigs
Speaking at small events can improve your speaking ability, give you some early traction, and spread your story or message
If you have a good idea for a talk and see an event that aligns with an area of your expertise, simply pitch your talk to the event organizers
Rather than pitch them directly on what he wants to talk about, he contacts them and asks them about the ideal topics they want to have speakers cover at an event. Once that is known, he then crafts the perfect pitch: one that hits on key points the organizers want to cover
Getting valuable early speaking experience is not difficult. Start by speaking for free at coworking spaces, nonprofits, and smaller conferences or events. Use these smaller-scale appearances to refine your talks and build your speaking reputation
When you start a talk, the audience is usually thinking about two questions: Why are you important enough to be the one giving a talk? What value can you offer me? These questions will be burning in their minds until you address them, so answer them immediately
All successful talks tell a story. Your story is about what your startup is doing, why you’re doing it, and specifically how you got to where you are or where things are going
Record your speaking engagements
Building a community to form a passionate community around your product
Community building involves investing in the connections among your customers, fostering those relationships and helping them bring more people into your startup’s circle
People want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. You need to have a mission if you want to build an awesome community. A powerful mission gives your community a shared sense of purpose and motivates them to contribute
It is important to focus on quality early on and set standards that can be maintained as the community grows
Spend time constructing your product or service while testing traction channels in parallel
Spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction
Think of your initial investment in traction as pouring water into a leaky bucket. At first your bucket will be very leaky because your product is not yet a full solution to customer needs and problems. Your product is not as sticky as it could be, and many customers will not want to engage with it yet. As a consequence, much of the money you are spending on traction will leak out of your bucket
When you constantly test traction channels by sending through a steady stream of new customers, you can tell if your product is getting less leaky over time
Get initial traction doing things that don't scale: give talks, write guest blog posts, email people you have relationships with, attend conferences, and do whatever you can to get in front of customers
"Startups take off because the founders make them take off. The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them." - Paul Graham
When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who intimately understand what you're working on (perhaps because they have worked on or invested in something similar before).
You shouldn't take rejection as a rejection of your idea. There are many reasons why investors may say no that are simply beyond your control (investment goals, timing, expertise, etc.)
Companies die because they don't have a good distribution strategy
With investing, always remember that traction trumps everything