Traction

It lived up to expectations. It’s the guide to kickstarting a startup’s marketing from any plateau, but especially for the first customers. The platforms referenced are getting stale the but ideas seem solid. I can see why so many recommend it.

This is an invaluable resource for finding the right distribution method(s) for a business. It was an extra bonus when the author revealed why his name sounded so familiar. The founder of DuckDuckGo is a pretty solid teacher for the concept of traction. His 19 tractions channels are each covered with real world use cases, accompanied with his bullseye framework, which ring by ring helps you hone in on the right traction channels for a business.

This is hard to rate for me. The basic framework is great and would get a 5 star, sadly the book didn’t age well. Lots of the examples for how to implement the framework don’t work anymore because those sites/channels stopped existing or aren’t important anymore.

Also: every time it introduces a person they interviewed they start with the amount of money they made by selling their business. Something that is of no interest and doesn’t make their point more important. I would have understood if they would have posted revenue numbers, but sadly in a startup world this doesn’t count. Additionally some of the tactics feel dangerous to a business in the more privacy focused world of today. Don’t get me wrong. Those ideas have been bad back then, too, but less people cared.

So just google bullseye framework, get that list, work from there. Faster and cheaper.