Book of the Week: Traction
03 Feb 2015
This week I decided to learn more about marketing by reading Traction, written by the founder of DuckDuckGo and another guy. One of difficult parts about marketing is knowing where to start. This book lists many possible channels and gives some background into each one. Since they cover so many channels, it is hard to go deep into each one, but I learned things that I did not know before. They put channels in relation to each other with the bull’s eye framework. For a company to be successful, you need to develop both your product and distribution channels at the same time. 19 Traction Channels
- Viral Marketing
- Public Relations
- Unconventional PR
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social and Display Ads
- Offline Ads
- Search Engine Optimization
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Engineering as Marketing
- Targeting Blogs
- Business Development
- Sales
- Affiliate Programs
- Existing Platforms
- Trade Shows
- Offline Events
- Speaking Engagements
- Community Building
Different channels work well for different products and different channels work well at different times. When Paul Graham talks about Doing Things That Don’t Scale, he is referring to using different channels at different times. The channels that scale are for later in the product’s life. Bull’s Eye Framework
- Brainstorm - think of ideas for each channel, do not throw any of them out
- Rank - by how likely each one could work
- Prioritize - pick top 3
- Test - get real numbers by spending a little bit of money or no money
- Focusing - extract traction from most promising channel
- Repeat - if no channel is promising after test
The framework forces you to think as wide as possible before focusing in. They say the Bull’s Eye Framework is similar to the lean startup methodology. Startups are hard, because there are so many things to focus on. This book will help you become a bit more systematic about it. It is provides a way to organize your efforts. Some may think it sounds like common sense, but I wonder how many people have taken the effort to write ideas for all 19 channels? This book is the start of my marketing journey. Purchase Traction on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.