„A good product will sell itself!” This is the biggest lie a startup owner can believe. To unlock sales growth, the distribution machine needs to be set in motion. How to do it? How can a company catch traction and start growing its customer base?
To the rescue come Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder at DuckDuckGo and Justin Mares, Founder at Kettle & Fire, the former Director of Revenue at Exceptional, who wrote a book „Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth”.
They interviewed over 40 startup founders and studied what made their companies grow. In the result, they identified 19 channels that startups use to find customers. Let's have a look!
Here are the 19 traction channels they identified:
A lot of options! To help you grasp them all, we’ve proposed grouping them into 8 categories. Each of the categories is supposed to capture the essence of underlying traction channels and shed a light on what they have in common.
19 opportunities that really work! But how to choose the one that works for you? No worries! Weinberg & Mares also proposed a process to find out which channel is the best for your company. Their Bullseye Framework consists of the following steps:
If you feel like your business is standing still, then... you're probably right. You've focused on the product and forgotten about distribution. Use our list and start looking for a channel that will give you traction. When you find the first one, test it to the limit! And then add more to the pool and just go with it. And have a successful journey!