Traction

Weinberg, who founded DuckDuckGo, and Mares argue that most startups fail from lack of distribution rather than lack of product, and that founders systematically underinvest in channels. Their prescription is the fifty percent rule, meaning that a founder should spend half their time on product and half on traction from the start rather than building first and distributing later.

The book's structure is a catalogue of nineteen traction channels: targeting blogs, publicity, unconventional public relations, search engine marketing, social and display ads, offline ads, search engine optimisation, content marketing, email marketing, viral marketing, engineering as marketing, business development, sales, affiliate programmes, existing platforms, trade shows, offline events, speaking engagements and community building. Each gets a chapter with tactics and with interviews from practitioners who used it successfully.

The method for choosing among them is the bullseye framework. A founder brainstorms plausible approaches in every channel, ranks them into an outer ring of possibilities, a middle ring of promising candidates to test, and an inner ring of the one channel that is working. They then run cheap tests in the middle ring simultaneously, with defined cost per acquisition targets, and concentrate entirely on whichever works.

The underlying claims are that one channel usually dominates at any stage, that the dominant channel changes as the company grows, and that founders default to the channels they already know rather than testing. The tactics are dated, since specific platforms, costs and mechanics have changed considerably since 2014. The channel taxonomy and the bullseye process have held up. The interviews are brief and mostly confirm the framework. It works as a checklist against which to test whether a company has actually considered its options.