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This book has 9 recommendations
Gunhee Park (Co-Founder/Populum)
This book lays out a framework to help any startup brainstorm ways to gain more customer traction.
Ola Olusoga (Co-founder/Populum)
I've read Influence by Robert Cialdini 3 times, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg twice, so if number of times read indicates favor, then those are it.
Joel Gascoigne (Co-founder/Buffer)
Traction has been a somewhat recent read for me. The key take-away I had from the book was to try to spend as much time on traction as on product development. The other realization the book triggered for me was that in the early days of Buffer, we focused our content marketing efforts around traction, and we found that guest blogging helped us a lot with spreading the word and triggering new signups for Buffer.
We now try to strike this balance a little better. As a team we don't necessarily believe that all marketing activity should be tied to creating traction, but we do think it is worth exploring new traction channels and measuring our impact on traction from marketing. I can recommend this book to any new startup trying to get traction, or existing startups trying to reach new levels of traction. The book helped to give us a nudge to try some new traction channels again.
Dave Child (Founder/Readable.io)
Recently, I've been reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. Readable.io has been growing well, and we've been exploring new marketing avenues and ideas. Traction is a really useful book to read in that regard - it explores a variety of different approaches to marketing, each paired with some direct experiences from someone who has achieved success with that approach. We're a small team, with limited resources, and the approach of Traction is working well for us so far. Seeing ideas explored and balanced with some real-world experiences is a nice way to get yourself to think about marketing possibilities, and less dry than some of the other books I've tried.Sanja Zepan (Co-Founder/Homey)
Then on general marketing side of things, I really enjoyed Traction, by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, is a great book that you can put into practice right away - I was actually reading this book in front a a whiteboard, drawing our own marketing bulls-eye and putting ideas down.Marc Montagne (Co-Founder/Toolwatch.io)
I've enjoyed reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares at the time I was starting Toolwatch.io. The very precise approach to customer acquisition helped us a lot in the first stages of Toolwatch and gave us a great framework to acquire new users which we are still using today!Cory Zue (Software Developer & Entrepreneur)
The business book I find myself recommending the most often is Traction, which is an excellent practical and high-level take on strategies for getting traction for your products. I found it particularly helpful because it prevents a framework and strategies you can actually execute and follow yourself instead of just pontificating about ideas.Pat Walls (Founder/StarterStory)
I love this book because of the problems it solved at the time that I read it. I think my favorite business book changes over time, and this book is very new and "with the times".Kevan Lee (Marketing Director/Buffer)
The bullseye framework for finding the best traction channels: Get it here.This book is part of our collection:
Amazon description
Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely.
As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.
Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path.
Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You’ll learn, for example, how to:
- Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using
- Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers
- Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates
- Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research
Weinberg and Mares know that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.
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See more books recommended by
Gunhee Park, Ola Olusoga, Joel Gascoigne, Dave Child, Sanja Zepan, Marc Montagne, Cory Zue, Pat Walls, Kevan Lee
See more books written by
Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
Sources
- Gunhee Park (Populum co-founder) interview
- Interview with Ola Olusoga: How Books Have Guided His Path To Self-Discovery
- 50 books that transformed my business and my life
- Book-Talk with Dave Child, Founder of Readable.io
- Sanja Zepan, Co-Founder of Homey, Provides Insight on Her Favorite Books
- Marc Montagne, Co-Founder of Toolwatch.io, Tells Us How to Choose the Best Books to Read
- Cory Zue, Software Developer & Entrepreneur, Talks Books & Business Advice for Young Entrepreneurs
- Pat Walls, Founder of StarterStory, About the Books that Transformed His Relationships
- My favorite marketing books