Traction

This book lays out a framework to help any startup brainstorm ways to gain more customer traction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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".

The bullseye framework for finding the best traction channels: Get it here.