I first heard of Traction while listening to the Startups for the rest of us Podcast some time back. I have to admit that I did not pay a lot of attention to it at that time. However, more recently, I have been working with a product founder and we were discussing some pretty decent growth that he had seen over the past 12 months or so. By decent I mean +100% in revenue. One of the things that came up repeatedly that he in fact recommended to me was this same book @ http://tractionbook.com/.
As soon as I started listening to this book – I opted for the audio version – I recognized that I’d heard some of the content more than once before. However, I found it very satisfying that there were real life examples / case studies from notable founders to support this content.
Since I’d purchased the audio version I reached out to the co-author and founder of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg via Twitter for materials , spreadsheets, etc and he provided me with a link to http://tractionstack.com/
@kylmbrown https://t.co/lchhIRV1df
— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) December 24, 2015
The book is full of useful information but having had some experience implementing some of the techniques discussed, I focused on specific chapters. Some of my favorite parts of Traction are listed below followed by my comments:
Chapter 11 – Ad Testing: More of a reminder for me but testing your ads are a critical part of deciding which ads are providing the best return.
Chapter 12 – Sources for Discount Offline advertising: Often what has kept me from offline advertising was the cost as compared to digital advertising which is typically more effective, more efficient at targeting demographics, and trackable. The discount channel for offline inventory is something that I plan to look further into.
Chapter 13 – Beginners Guides for:This is a good summarized refresher if you have some experience with SEO. It’s a great place to start if you do not. You can reach the guide @ https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo. You can reach the TractionStack link @ http://tractionstack.com/resourcesbychapter/2015/9/11/traction-testing-chapter-4
Chapter 17 – Engineering as Marketing: This is a good summarized refresher if you have some experience with SEO. It’s a great place to start if you do not. You can reach this tool @ https://marketing.grader.com. You can reach the TractionStack link @ http://tractionstack.com/resourcesbychapter/2015/9/11/engineering-as-marketing-chapter-16
Chapter 19 – Sales Cycle: Design your sales cycle around the way that your customers think things work. Not the way that you think things work.
Chapter 24 – Summary: This is a good place to start if you prefer summaries OR if you want to get a sample of a chapter to help figure which chapters you want to dig into.
Now it’s time to implement some of these strategies in 2016! I hope this was useful to you.
Great insight to the book!
The Best eBook I’ve Ever Read Like someone else wrote, most free eBooks have splinelg errors and lousy formatting. This isn’t one of them.This book is divided into bite-sized paragraphs, each of which stands on it’s own. One of them will speak to you. Take this one: Stop being a salesman. You only become a salesman’ when you don’t thoroughly believe in the power your product has to improve someone’s life. Everything else is just helping people. Either start believing in your product or stop selling it and find a product you really can believe in. It’s a refreshing read that can be finished in less than five minutes. Get it.