Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares in their book, Traction, is a simple, but effective process on how a startup team can focus in on the right channels for distribution resulting in a surge of customer acquisition. Here is a summary of key elements from their book. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution— not product— is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth the time to do the needed research to find the single best distribution channels for a startup. Using the Bullseye Framework to find your channel is a five-step process:
- Brainstorm – reasonable ways you might use each traction channel. Seek to counter your biases to find the most effective traction path for your startup. You should know what marketing strategies have worked in your industry , as well as the history of companies in your space . It’s especially important to understand how similar companies acquired customers over time, and how unsuccessful companies wasted marketing dollars. The Bullseye Spreadsheet is a great guide for this process.
- Rank – The ranking step helps you organize your brainstorming efforts. It also helps you start to think a bit more critically about the traction channels in aggregate. Column A (Inner Circle): which traction channels seem most promising right now? Column B (Potential): which traction channels seem like they could possibly work? Column C (Long-shot): which traction channels seem like long-shots?
- Prioritize – identify your inner circle: the three traction channels that seem most promising.
- Test – The testing step is where you put your ideas into the real world. The goal of this step is to find out which of the traction channels in your inner circle is worth giving focus. You want to design smaller scale tests that don’t require much upfront cost or effort. For example, run four Facebook ads vs. forty.
- Focus on what works – If all goes well, one of the traction channels you tested in your inner circle produced promising results. At any stage in a startup’s lifecycle, one traction channel dominates in terms of customer acquisition. As you dive deeper into it , you will uncover effective tactics and do everything you can to scale them until they are no effective due to rising cost or saturation.
- 50% Rule – Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.
- Comparison to Lean – What Lean is to product development, Bullseye is to traction. With Lean, you figure out the right features to build. With Bullseye, you figure out the right traction channel to pursue.
- Moving the Needle – focusing on marketing activities that result in a measurable, significant impact on your company. From the perspective of getting traction, think about working on a product in three phases: Phase I – making something people want, Phase II – marketing something people want, Phase III – scaling your business. Some traction channels will move the needle early on, but will fail to work later. Startup growth happens in spurts . Initially, growth is usually slow. Then, it spikes as a useful traction channel is unlocked.
- To Pivot or Not to Pivot – Weinberg and Marse strongly believe that many startups give up way too early. A lot of startup success hinges on choosing a great market at the right time. The definition of traction keeps changing as the environment gets competitive. If you’re not seeing the traction you want, look for bright spots in your user base, pockets of users that 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.
- How much does it cost to acquire customers through this channel strategy?
- How many customers are available through this channel strategy?
- How well do these customers convert? How long does it take to acquire a customer?
- Always having a traction goal you’re working towards. An example could be 500 paying customers, 50 new daily users or 5% of your market.
- Define and order milestones to for a clear Critical Path. Work on the first steps and nothing else. After they are complete, re-assess your critical path using the market knowledge you just learned from achieving that milestone.
- Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
- Strategize, Test, Measure: The Bullseye Framework by Brian Balfour of CoElevate-Growth and User Acquisition
- 5 Steps To Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channel by Brian Balfour of CoElevate-Growth and User Acquisition
- The 50% Rule for Traction by Ash Maury
- How to Acquire Customers: 19 “Traction Channels to Start Testing Today” from Zapier’s blog
- Bullseye Framework for finding the best acquisition channels by Dave Chaffey A great graphic of the Bullseye framework
- A link to see a slideshow of Traction book: http://www.slideshare.net/jwmares/traction-trumps-everything