How startup customer growth benefits from traction

Key quotes:

• "There are nineteen customer traction channels: Rule 1) Focus 50% of your time on Marketing and 50% of time on creating the product."
• "Rule 2) Speak to your crowd so they can help you get the right product to market, before you get it launched."
• "Rule 3) Dropbox built a viral marketing traction channel that worked for them."
• "Rule 6) Understand what marketing channels work well in your industry."
• "Rule 8) Comprise a table to help understand the opportunity of each marketing channel."
• "Out of the many small and cheap tests you done, one will work particularly well — direct all of your efforts to this channel and maximise it, keep doing this until you hit a saturation point and growth slows down."

Key quotes:

• "The authors of Traction have identified and listed 19 growth channels which any startup can deploy to achieve required traction: However before we learn about each of the channels, it important to learn about the Bulls Eye framework which the authors have presented to help deploy the right channels at the right time."
• "The framework is briefly presented below: The Bulls Eye is a structured process to test and deploy one core traction channel at a time until it reaches saturation after necessary optimization."
• "These tests are meant to be small experiments which can run in parallel to each other to get relevant data and close on your core channel."
• "The Inner Ring: As you finish tests in the middle ring and if all went well you would have hit bulls eye by now as one of the traction channels would have trumped all to come on top."

Key quotes:

• "Based on insights from interviews with more than 40 successful startup founders — including Paul English (Kayak), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) and Alexis Ohanian (reddit) — ”Traction” will teach you how to: You can read key concepts from the first 14 chapters in this post or download the entire audio and text book summary (as part of our free business starter kit) below: It is quantitative evidence that your company is growing rapidly due to customer demand for your product or service."
• "One way to identify viable marketing strategies for your specific startup is to do some research into what has worked (and not worked) for other successful companies in your industry that offer similar services or products."
• "To zero in on your one successful channel, start by experimenting with low-priced traction tests to identify those that have the most potential."

Key quotes:

• "We interviewed Colin Nederkoorn, founder of email marketing startup Customer.io, to discuss how startups can get the most out of this traction channel."
• "Though difficult to sustain, it’s been the driving force behind the explosive growth of consumer startups like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp."
• "Your team’s engineering skills can get your startup traction directly by building tools and resources that reach more people."
• "We asked Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, to discuss how engineering as marketing has driven HubSpot’s growth to tens of thousands of customers through tools like its Marketing Grader."
• "An affiliate program is an arrangement where you pay people or companies for performing certain actions like making a sale or getting a qualified lead."
• "We interviewed Kristopher Jones, founder of the Pepperjam affiliate network, to learn how a startup can leverage this channel."

Key quotes:

• "This summer, she’s taking a hiatus from wearing lab coats and safety goggles to something just as explosive (but less risk of chemical burn) — working with the 500 Distribution Team."
• "In this blog post, she summarizes Ilya Lichenstein’s recent talk on how to 10x your growth in her own unique way."
• "Follow her at @samanthassiow GOTTA GROW FAST amirite amirite har har har ok i’ll stop I recently watched the talk by Ilya Lichenstein, the CEO and co-founder of MixRank."
• "Lichenstein covered the topic of accelerating growth through simple market strategies for startups with some early traction."
• "Lichenstein started by saying that before you decide to focus on growth, you have to figure out whether your startup is ready to enter that stage."
• "In order to do so, you need to make sure that it is the right time to grow."