Home · Book Reports · 2025 · Traction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

designates my notes. / designates important. / designates very important.

page numbers from pdf

Thoughts

Exceptional Quotes

• The Archives.com team used AdWords to drive traffic to landing pages before they made a big investment in building a product. Each landing page was written to test interest in a specific product approach. For example, one page tested “get access to census data” while another tested “get access to your family genealogy.”

Table of Contents

• 00: Preface - Traction Trumps Everything
• 01: Traction Channels
• 02: Traction Thinking
• 03: Bullseye
• 04: Traction Testing
• 05: Critical Path
• 06: Targeting Blogs
• 07: Publicity
• 08: Unconventional PR
• 09: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• 10: Social and Display Ads
• 11: Offline Ads
• 12: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• 13: Content Marketing
• 14: Email Marketing
• 15: Viral Marketing
• 16: Engineering as Marketing
• 17: Business Development
• 18: Sales
• 19: Affiliate Programs
• 20: Existing Platforms
• 21: Trade Shows
• 22: Offline Events
• 23: Speaking Engagements
• 24: Community Building
• Appendix: Middle Ring Tests

· Preface - Traction Trumps Everything

page 11:

• Competing against Google? Why? How? Another year later, in the fall of 2008, I flipped the switch, unveiling my search engine to the public. DuckDuckGo== had a rather uneventful launch

· Chapter 01 - Traction Channels

page 16:

• startups get traction through nineteen different channels

· Chapter 02 - Traction Thinking

page 23:

• Having a product or service that your early customers love, but having no clear way to get more traction is a major problem. To solve this problem, spend your time constructing your product or service and testing traction channels in parallel.

• Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.

• First, you could build something people want, but for which you just can’t figure out a viable business model. The money isn’t adding up. For example, people won’t pay, and selling advertising won’t cover the bills. There is just no real market.

• Second, you could build something people want, but there are just not enough customers to reach profitability. It’s just too small a market, and there aren’t obvious ways to expand. This occurs often when startups aren’t ambitious enough and pick too narrow a niche.

• Third, you could build something people want, but reaching them is cost prohibitive. You find yourself in a hard-to-reach market. An example is a relatively inexpensive product that requires a direct sales force to sell it. That combo just doesn’t work.

• Finally, you could build something people want, but a lot of other companies build it too. In this situation you are in a hypercompetitive market where it is simply too hard to get customers.

page 26:

• In the leaky bucket metaphor, phase I is when your bucket (product) has the most leaks. It really doesn’t hold water. There is no reason to scale up your efforts now, but it is still important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them.

• The money you leak in this phase is well spent. It helps you build the right product.

• As you hone your product, you are effectively plugging leaks. Once you have crossed over to phase II, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around.

• In phase III, you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and are focused on scaling both to further dominate the market and to profit.

page 29:

• It’s important to wrap your head around this timescale. If you are just starting out, are you ready to potentially do this for the next decade? In retrospect, a lot of founders feel they picked their company idea too quickly, and they would have picked something they were more passionate about if they had realized it was such a long haul. A startup can be awesome if you believe in it: if not, it can get old quickly.

· Chapter 03 - Bullseye

page 31:

• Peter Thiel put it:

• [You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing—everything but the kitchen sink. That is a really bad idea. It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.

• The Outer Ring - What’s Possible

• The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel.

• The Middle Ring - What’s Probable

• The second step in Bullseye is running cheap traction tests in the channels that seem most promising.

page 33:

• For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to determine if the idea really is good or not. These tests should be designed to roughly answer the following three questions:

1. How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel?

2. How many customers are available through this channel?

3. Are the customers that you are getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?

• Keep in mind that, when testing, you are not trying to get a lot of traction with a channel just yet. Instead, you are simply trying to determine if it’s a channel that could move the needle for your startup. Your main consideration at this point is speed—to get data and to prove your assumptions.

• You should be able to get a rough idea of a channel’s effectiveness with at most a thousand dollars and a month of time. Often, it will be cheaper and shorter.

• The Inner Ring - What’s Working

• The third and final step in Bullseye is to focus solely on the channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel.

• wring every bit of traction out of your core channel

page 35:

• Let Bullseye help you break out of your comfort zone and try channels that are unfamiliar because they may be the key to your growth.

· Chapter 04 - Traction Testing

page 40:

• In general in phase I, you shouldn’t be spending more than a thousand dollars and a month’s time on a middle ring test, and often significantly less.

page 43:

• Once you have a core traction channel, it is often instructive to brainstorm the other eighteen traction channels in terms of how you might use them to support your core channel.

page 44:

• a spreadsheet is a natural tool to use. At a minimum, include the columns of how many customers are available, conversion rate, cost to acquire a customer, and lifetime value of a customer for a given strategy. Because these metrics are universal, you can use them to easily make comparisons across strategies. In general, we encourage you to be as quantitative as possible, even if it is just guesstimating at first.

• Most channels will yield you some customers, and so they are all tempting to some degree. The operative question then is, “Does this channel have enough customers to be meaningful?” A simple spreadsheet calculation can go a long way!

· Chapter 05 - Critical Path

page 49:

• About offline channels:

• I’ll bet you a lot of your competition will refuse to even try these channels. And if that’s true, that’s even more reason to go try those channels! It can almost be a competitive advantage (at least a temporary one) if you can acquire customers in channels that others cannot, or refuse to try. That’s more interesting than duking it out with AdWords competitors in positions one to three.

· Chapter 06 - Targeting Blogs

page 51:

• one of the most effective ways to get your first wave of customers. However, this traction channel can be difficult to scale in phases II and III due to the limited number of relevant high-traffic blogs.

• Paul Graham put it like this:

• The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you’re going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.

page 53:

• Many personal bloggers have strong readerships, but don’t make money from their writing. Noah offered them a way to show off a cool new service and make some money doing it. He simply sent them a message with “Can I send you $500?” as the subject and told them a bit about the product and what Mint was trying to do. Most were happy to share a useful product with their audiences and make some money in the process.

page 55:

• Run tests on a variety of smaller blogs. See what type of audience resonates best with your product and messaging. There are a variety of tools you can use to uncover relevant blogs, including YouTube, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, search engines, Google Alerts, and Social Mention. You can also ask people!

• Sponsor small blogs, especially personal blogs. Providing influential bloggers early access or offering early access in exchange for spreading the word are other effective strategies.

· Chapter 07 - Publicity

page 60:

• A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.

page 61:

• If your pitch doesn’t draw a line in the sand—with some people shaking their heads and some people nodding—it won’t get discussed as widely as you hope.

• Ryan offered this template email he’s used to pitch reporters successfully:

Subject: Quick question

Hey [name],

I wanted to shoot you a note because I loved your post on [similar topic that
did a lot of traffic]. I was going to give the following to our publicist, but I
thought I would go to you with the exclusive because I read and really enjoy
your stuff. My [company built a user base of 25,000 paying customers in two
months without advertising / book blows the lid off an enormous XYZ scandal].
And I did it completely off the radar. This means you would be the first to have
it. I can write up any details you’d need to make it great. Do you think this
might be a good fit?

If so, should I draft something around [their average] words and send it to you,
or do you prefer a different process? If not, I totally understand, and thanks
for reading this much.

All the best,
[Your Name]

• I would have simply included a draft and said I could add/edit anything needed and answer questions if they wanted to edit it.

page 62:

• Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can. Here are a few ways to do it:

  • Submit the story to link-sharing sites (reddit, Hacker News) with larger audiences.
  • Share it on social networks to drive awareness, which you can further amplify with social ads.
  • Email it to influencers in your industry for comment. Some of them will share it with their audiences.
  • Ping blogs in your space and tell them that you have a story that’s getting some buzz. These writers may then want to jump in themselves to cover you.

• Once your story has been established as a popular news item, drag it out as long as you can. Email blogs that covered the story (as well as ones that didn’t) and offer an interview that adds to the original story. How We Did This” follow-up interviews are popular.

· Chapter 08 - Unconventional PR

page 65:

• When done right, publicity stunts can propel a startup from anonymity to national recognition in an instant. That’s exactly what happened to Half.com.

• Before their launch, the team at Half.com spent weeks brainstorming ways they could get on the national radar. Eventually, they came up with the unconventional idea to rename a town! And, in one of the most well- executed startup PR stunts, for one year the little town of Halfway, Oregon, was known as Half.com.

• Founder Josh Kopelman launched Half.com on the Today show with the mayor of Halfway, Oregon. This stunt had everything traditional media loved in a piece: it was unique, surrounded the launch of a high-potential new startup, and told a story about how the company was creating jobs in a small town (they hired several residents).

• As another example, DuckDuckGo (Gabriel’s search engine) bought a billboard in Google’s backyard highlighting its privacy focus. It then used the billboard to get national press stories in USA Today, Wired, and many other media outlets. The reactions from this stunt alone doubled its user base at the time.

page 67:

• David Hauser took a similar approach at Grasshopper.com. Over the past several years, he’s sent customers Skittles, homemade cookies, Starbucks gift cards, books, and handwritten notes thanking them for their business. Doing these types of things has worked so well for Grasshopper that it has hired two full-time employees whose sole responsibility is to delight customers.

• Holding a contest is a great, repeatable way to generate publicity and get some word of mouth.

• Good customer support is so rare that, if you simply try to make your customers happy, they are likely to spread the news of your awesome product on that basis alone.

page 68:

• David and his team pulled off another successful stunt when they introduced “The New Dork” video. They noticed a lack of startup-themed viral videos and so parodied the popular Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind” with a video called “The New Dork.” This video received more than 1 million views and was mentioned by Ashton Kutcher, Mashable, and TechCrunch. The Grasshopper team made a conscious decision to include references to popular publications like Mashable in their video. When the video came out, they sent them a quick note about where in the video they made an appearance. This approach gave publications and individuals an incentive to show their audience how cool they were (by referencing themselves in the video) while giving Grasshopper additional exposure.

page 70:

• Success in this channel is unpredictable. You should have a defined process for brainstorming and selecting ideas, but also understand that not every idea will work.

· Chapter 09 - Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

page 71:

• Here is some basic SEM terminology you should understand before we dive in:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR)—the percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site. For example, if one hundred people see your ad and three of them click on it, you have a CTR of 3 percent (3/100).

• Cost per Click (CPC)—the amount it costs to buy a click on an advertisement. CPC is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay to get a potential customer to your site.

• Cost per Acquisition (CPA)—CPA is a measure of how much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. For example, suppose you buy clicks at $1 and 10 percent of the people who hit your site after clicking on your ad make a purchase. This puts your CPA at $10:

• CPA = $1/10% = $10.

page 72:

• One of the things I want to really emphasize here is just how compelling SEM is as a way to get early customer data in a fairly controlled, predictable manner. So even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend $5,000 (or $1,000, or $500) on an advertising campaign and get an early base of customers and users. It informs a whole bunch of things that are really important in terms of the basic [metrics]: conversion rate of your landing pages, how well email captures are working . . . if you’re selling a product, what the average cost per customer is and what their lifetime value might be. Having those baseline metrics is critical for informing your strategy moving forward and determining what you need to work on. - Matthew Monahan

• The Archives.com team used AdWords to drive traffic to landing pages before they made a big investment in building a product. Each landing page was written to test interest in a specific product approach. For example, one page tested “get access to census data” while another tested “get access to your family genealogy.”

page 73:

• The basic SEM process is to find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and then test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, you remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to better-performing ads and landing pages to keep improving results.

page 75:

• someone just starting out in this channel should begin testing just four ads. Four ads will give you a good baseline for the performance of SEM as a whole, while still allowing you to test different messaging, demographics, and landing pages.

· Chapter 10 - Social and Display Ads

page 83:

• This granular targeting allows you to target very small groups of people. In fact, Gabriel once ran a test campaign that targeted only his wife! (He targeted her by her alma mater, zip code, and interest affinities, using a picture of their son to see how long it would take for her to notice. Not very long.)

· Chapter 11 - Offline Ads

page 86:

• audience prospectus (sometimes called an ad kit)

• demographics, number of people that will see the ad, etc

page 87:

• To get really cheap offline ads, look for remnant advertising. Remnant advertising is ad space that is currently being unused. For example, publications accept almost any price when selling empty inventory near print deadlines

• If dealing with national magazines, consider using a print or remnant ad” buying agency such as Manhattan Media or Novus Media that specializes in negotiating discounted pricing of up to 90% off rate card. Feel free to negotiate still lower using them as a go-between.

page 88:

• ad kit (also known as a media package, media kit, or press kit).

page 89:

• It may surprise you to learn how effectively you can target customers through direct mail. You can build up a list of customers on your own or buy a list from a mailing organization. Simply do a Web search for “direct mail lists” to find companies selling such information. Beware that buying lists can be perceived as spammy, and can be a complete waste of money if they are untargeted.

• You can buy lists grouped by demographic, geography, or both. These lists often sell for about $100 for one thousand consumer names, and a bit more for business names and addresses.

• Use handwritten envelopes and cards to increase the chances of someone opening and reading your mailing.

• Investigate bulk mail with the postal service to get reduced pricing.

· Chapter 12 - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

page 96:

• fat head and long tail

• At the top are one- and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” “Braves,” and “Facebook.” They make up about 30 percent of all searches. The other 70 percent are longer searches that don’t get searched as much, but in the aggregate add up to the majority of searches made.

• “wooden toys.” vs. “poisonous chemicals in wooden toy blocks” or “wood puzzles for 3 year olds.”

• infographics, slideshows, images, and original research to drive links, as these are all things people naturally share.

· Chapter 13 - Content Marketing

page 107:

• Having a strong company blog can positively impact at least eight other traction channels—SEO, publicity, email marketing, targeting blogs, community building, offline events, existing platforms, and business development.

· Chapter 14 - Email Marketing

page 109:

• email marketing works best when it is personalized.

page 110:

• build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.

• At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address. Many companies require an email address for people to access premium content, such as videos or white papers. In our interview with Rick Perreault of Unbounce, he stated that this tactic was the single biggest driver of its email list growth.

• Another popular approach to building an email list is creating a short, free course related to your area of expertise. These mini-courses are meant to educate potential customers about your problem space and product. At the end of the course you put a call to action, such as asking people to purchase your product, start a free trial, or share something with their friends.

• A popular approach is to create a sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new customers to the key features in your product. Instead of throwing everything at them right away, you can email them five days after they’ve signed up and say, “Hey, did you know we have this feature?”, as Colin explains:

page 111:

• [Y]ou create the ideal experience for your users when they sign up for your trial. You then create all of the paths they can go down when they fail to go through the ideal experience. And you have emails in place to catch them and help them get back on that [ideal] path.

• Let’s take Dropbox as an example. If you create an account but never upload a file, you are not active. Maybe you signed up for the site but got busy and forgot about it. When this happens, Dropbox automatically emails you, reminding you to upload a file. With these targeted emails, Dropbox has increased the chance that you will return to the product and become an active user.

• For these emails, you should determine the steps absolutely necessary to get value from your product. Then create targeted emails to make sure people complete those steps. For those who fail to complete step one, create a message that automatically emails them when they’ve dropped off. Repeat this at every step where people could quit, and you will see a major uptick in the number of people finishing the activation process.

page 114:

• Timing is especially relevant to get higher open rates: many marketers suggest sending emails between nine a.m. and twelve p.m. in your customer’s time zone or scheduling emails to reach them at the time they registered for your email list (e.g., for people who signed up for your list at eight p.m., email them at eight p.m.).

page 115:

• One trick Colin told us about was not to send any email that comes from a “Noreply” email address (e.g., noreply@facebook.com). Intead, use that opportunity to send the automated email from a personal address and allow the recipient to reply with questions or problems they have.

· Chapter 15 - Viral Marketing

· Chapter 16 - Engineering as Marketing

page 125:

• When you enter your site’s Web address into Marketing Grader, you get back a customized report about how well you’re doing with your online marketing (social media mentions, blog post shares, basic SEO). This tool is free and gives you valuable information. It also provides HubSpot with information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.

• Tools should be on separate domains. Good for SEO. Easier to remember/link to.

· Chapter 17 - Business Development

page 132:

• Business development is like sales with one key distinction: it is primarily focused on exchanging value through partnerships, whereas sales primarily focuses on exchanging dollars for a product. With sales, you’re selling directly to a customer. With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.

· Chapter 18 - Sales

page 141:

• We went to our potential customers, insurance companies, and proposed to do a short free consulting study that would provide [an assessment] of their operation. We would spend approximately seven to ten man-days of effort understanding their operations, and at the end we would give them a high-level presentation benchmarking them as compared to their peers. In return, we asked for feedback on what would make the best system that would meet their needs. In the end, we were able to work with over forty insurance companies this way. We were honest about our motives at all times, and we made sure to provide quality output.

page 143:

• “You get your first customers by picking up the phone.”

• Cold calling junior employees is just as difficult mentally as calling more senior employees, but has a much lower success probability because they have less decision-making authority and industry knowledge.

· Chapter 19 - Affiliate Programs

• Similar to SEM, but you get the advertiser/affiliate to assume the risk. You generally only pay upon a successful sale (or quality lead).

· Chapter 20 - Existing Platforms

page 164:

• Some of the most successful startups grew by making bets on emerging platforms that were not yet saturated and where barriers to discovery were low. . . . Betting on new platforms means you’ll likely fail if the platform fails, but it also dramatically lowers the distribution risks described above.

· Chapter 21 - Trade Shows

page 166:

• Figure out how much you can spend per year and allocate this budget by quarter.

page 167:

• Set up meetings. Yes, meetings! Trade shows are a rare chance to get face time with:
  • Editors of online and offline magazines. Often overlooked, editors are your key to real press. I’ve been published in every major programming magazine; almost all of that I can directly attribute to talking with editors at trade shows! It works.
  • Bloggers you like, especially if you wish they’d write about you.
  • Existing customers.
  • Potential customers currently trialing your stuff.
  • Your vendors.
  • Your competition.
  • Potential partners.

page 168:

• The other secret conference trick that is orchestrated by the true Zen masters is to schedule a dinner and invite other people. It’s a great way to get to know people intimately. Start by booking a few easy-to-land friends who are interesting. Work hard to bag a “brand name” person who others will want to meet. All it takes is one. Then the rest of your invites can mention that person’s name on the guest list (name others, too . . . obviously) and you will be able to draw in some other people you’d like to meet.

• Another similar strategy is with customers. If you invite three to four customers and three to four prospects to a dinner with two or three employees and some other interesting guests you’ll be doing well. Potential customers always prefer to talk to existing reference customers than to talk to just your sales reps.

• Final tip: picking a killer venue is one of the best ways to bag high-profile people. Everybody loves to eat somewhere hot. However, sometimes a dinner can be too expensive for an early- stage company. So why not go in on the dinner with two other companies? That way you’re all extending your networks and splitting the costs.

· Chapter 22 - Offline Events

page 175:

• a day-long mini-conference could be a great way for a smaller startup to get traction. It can also be an easy and cheap way to test if there’s any interest among your audience for a larger event.

• A local university lecture hall is a good place to hold an event like this. Often, universities are willing to open their facilities if it’s for an educational purpose and if some of their faculty or students are participating. This type of mini-conference can be done for less than $500.

page 176:

• With MicroConf, Rob intentionally keeps it small so that attendees have a chance to meet everyone else at the event and the speakers can get to know the attendees. At larger events, speakers get mobbed after they give a talk or sit on a panel. At smaller events, each attendee can connect with every speaker personally. Rob facilitated these conversations by having the speakers sit with the attendees at lunch and participate in roundtable discussions.

· Chapter 23 - Speaking Engagements

page 178:

• Teaching is what content marketing is all about: webinars, blog posts, and the like. I look at [these] things as the future of good marketing. The opportunity to teach and be in front of a room for forty-five minutes introducing your company and your story to potential customers is time well spent.

page 179:

• You have to get the attention of event organizers to land speaking engagements. Event organizers need to fill time at their events. If you have a good idea for a talk and see an event that aligns with an area of your expertise, simply pitch your talk to the event organizers. If your ideas are solid, they will want you.

• Rather than pitch them directly on what he wants to talk about, he contacts them and asks them about the ideal topics they want to have speakers cover at an event. Once that is known, he then crafts the perfect pitch: one that hits on key points the organizers want to cover.

page 180:

• To become a speaker you have to speak once. If you speak and you’re good, people in the audience will ask you to speak at other events. That’s just how it happens. I’ve never marketed myself as a speaker; it’s not in my bio or anything. What happens is, you speak at a conference, people see it or talk about it, and you get invited to other ones.

• When you start a talk, the audience is usually thinking about two questions: Why are you important enough to be the one giving a talk? What value can you offer me? These questions will be burning in their minds until you address them, so answer them immediately. For this reason, Dan told us he does his own introductions and highlights how he started and sold his two previous companies (Flowtown and Spheric) for millions.

• Once you’ve captured the audience’s attention, keep it with a gripping story. All successful talks tell a story. Your story is about what your startup is doing, why you’re doing it, and specifically how you got to where you are or where things are going.

page 181:

• Record your speaking engagements.

• tweets his slides before every presentation, which lets his followers find out what he’ll be talking about. Then, when he posts a video of his talk, there is already some buzz and interest in watching and sharing it.

• Dan Martell will even try to leverage social media during his talk. He asks for the audience’s “divided attention,” meaning he wants them to tweet and share good content from his presentation as he gives it. To facilitate this, he includes his Twitter handle on every slide and asks people to tweet at him if they really identified with something he said. This way, he can find out the content his audience enjoyed the most, while also growing his reach.

• gives the audience a call to action at the end of his presentations. This is a simple request of the audience—something like asking them to sign up to a mailing list or to check out a link where they can see his slides.

page 182:

• We already mentioned that Dan prepares only two talks that he delivers at speaking engagements. But what if one conference asks for a twenty- minute presentation and another asks for sixty? It’s time-consuming to prepare a whole new talk: it’s more efficient to tailor your existing slides to a specific audience or event. As Dan said:

• The best talks I’ve ever seen are where each slide is essentially a seven-minute story with a beginning, middle, and end. Once you get good at that, and you have these canned slides, you can change a sixty-minute talk to a twenty-minute talk just by taking slides out.

· Chapter 24 - Community Building

page 186:

• biggest mistake in building Stack Overflow: When people ask me what our biggest mistake was in building Stack Overflow I’m glad I don’t have to fudge around with platitudes. I can honestly and openly point to a huge, honking, ridiculously dumb mistake I made from the very first day of development on Stack Overflow. . . . I didn’t see the need for a Meta.

• Meta is, of course, the place where you go to discuss the place. Take a moment and think about what that means. Meta is for people who care so deeply about their community that they’re willing to go one step further, to come together and spend even more of their time deciding how to maintain and govern it. So, in a nutshell, I was telling the people who loved Stack Overflow the most of all to basically . . . f**k off and go away.

page 188:

• Hires that come from your community already buy into your mission. These are people you really want on your team—community members who didn’t just believe in your mission, but also took the initiative to help you achieve it.

· Appendix - Middle Ring Tests

page 192:

• middle ring tests in phase I should cost less than a thousand dollars and take less than one month of time. However, please keep in mind that these may not be the best tests for you to run. You might come up with better tests in your Bullseye process.

• Targeting Blogs—Contact ten niche blogs and try to get them to review your product. To make it really easy for them, offer to walk them through the product (in person if you can find local bloggers or connect with them at events). You can also make the offer even more enticing by giving them the opportunity to give something away to their audience (discounts, T-shirt contest, etc.). Alternatively, you could find blogs that don’t run advertisements and ask several if you could run an advertisement on them for $100/month.

• Publicity—Contact five relevant local reporters about your company and try to get them to write about you. Local stories are much easier to get written since there is already local interest. Offer to meet them in person to walk through the product. Their phone numbers might be listed on their publication Web sites. Otherwise, try reaching out on Twitter or at events you know they’ll be covering.

• Unconventional PR—Host a contest around your product. This contest could be as simple as a cash giveaway for creative product usage or as complicated as a game constructed around your product. Once it’s set up, try a bit of both paid media (e.g., Twitter ads) and earned media (e.g., local press and blogs) to promote your contest. Alternatively, try a more creative approach with an infographic or video you think could go viral with your audience. If you have a large incumbent competitor, it could be explaining how they do something poorly in some way (and at the end how you do it better).

page 193:

• Search Engine Marketing—Try four ads in Bing Ads (often cheaper than Google AdWords). These ads should be on keywords you’re highly confident will convert into long-term customers. Try some of these keywords even if they seem relatively expensive compared with keywords you’re less confident about. You want to figure out in the best-case conversion scenario whether SEM could work. Make sure before you turn them on that you have everything set up correctly to actually detect conversions (and not just clicks to your site). If you can’t automate that, then you can ask new customers how they heard of you (manually if necessary).

• Social and Display Ads—Try a Facebook or Twitter ad campaign. Use their targeting capabilities to target two niche audiences that you think would really convert well. You can get very specific here, and you should. On Twitter, advertise against Twitter handles you think are directly related to your product (like industry leaders, aggregators, or even competitors). For Facebook, advertise against complementary affinity groups. If there are local areas you have a hunch would work better, for example, certain cities, then restrict your ads further to those areas. Make sure you try a few different images in your ads, as the image can have a major effect on performance.

• Offline Ads—Advertise on a niche podcast. With these advertisements, the host usually reads your copy directly to his listeners. It needs to be niche enough where you think the audience would really like your offer, but still small enough where it is reasonably priced (as podcast ads can get expensive for larger audiences). Alternatively, run a few ads in local papers.

• Search Engine Optimization—Test a long-tail SEO strategy by making some content-rich pages. Perhaps your product can naturally produce data for these pages, or maybe you have enough data from making and researching your product. Link to these new pages right from your home page (e.g., on the footer), as that will give them the highest rankings. Let relevant people know about your content and see if they’ll repost it with a link back to the original source. Alternatively, test a fat-head SEO strategy by identifying promising fat-head keywords and then running search engine ads to see how effective the traffic may be. This is a very similar basic test to Search Engine Marketing itself, though the keywords may be different.

• Content Marketing—Start a company blog and write one blog post a week for a month. Promote your posts on Twitter and on link-sharing sites (e.g., reddit). If you see any significant audience growth and conversion, double down and commit to a few more months. Turn on comments for your posts and engage with any commenters. Try to write controversial or surprising posts, ideally using new data you’ve researched. Alternatively, do a couple of guest posts on other blogs.

page 194:

• Email Marketing—Contact ten email newsletters in your niche and advertise on at least two of them where it makes sense financially. If they don’t usually run advertisements in their emails, ask to sponsor the list for a week or month. Alternatively, develop a seven-email mini-course, where you teach something relevant to your product. Make a landing page for the course and drive some traffic to it. At the end of the mini-course, upsell prospective customers to becoming real customers of your product.

• Viral Marketing—Build a viral loop into your product and measure your viral coefficient and viral cycle time. See which step is the weakest in your viral loop (signup percentage, number of invites, click-through percentage). Run five tests to improve this weakest step and see how it affects your viral coefficient. If it gets near 0.5, then you might be on to something.

• Engineering as Marketing—Make a simple, free tool tangentially relevant to your company; for example, a calculator of some kind that would be useful to prospective customers. Put it on its own domain and name it something that people would search for. Collect contact information in exchange for using the tool. Reach out to anyone who uses your tool with a personal email about your main product.

• Business Development—Write down three types of companies that could be useful to yours in terms of partnerships. For example, are there companies with complementary products? Identify some smaller players and reach out to two in each category, six in total. Have conversations with as many as will have them to gauge interest. Try to strike at least one deal.

• Sales—List twenty local, prospective customers. Try to get warm intros to as many as possible and meet with them in person to discuss your product. Use the SPIN approach we presented in the Sales chapter. Alternatively, reach out cold over email to one hundred prospective customers who you think have a high likelihood of converting into real customers.

• Affiliate Programs—Register your product at the most relevant major affiliate network (there is a list at the end of the Affiliate Programs chapter). Recruit twenty affiliates from this program using a simple and attractive payout structure. Contact each affiliate personally to walk them through the product, which will greatly increase the chances they will sell effectively. Alternatively, contact existing customers you think might be well connected to prospective customers and strike affiliate deals with them.

• Existing Platforms—Identify the most relevant niche platform where your audience hangs out online (e.g., Craigslist, Tumblr, etc.). Research the best practices for promoting products on that platform and then do so with your product. Try some paid tools or advertising if available for the platform. Alternatively, make a simple browser extension and try to get featured.

page 195:

• Trade Shows—Follow the procedure outlined in the Trade Shows chapter to list all the obviously relevant events over the next year. Dig deeper on the next few months to make sure smaller events are on your list. Ask your local startup community if anyone has been to these events. Exhibit at the one that seems most promising. Alternatively, go to a bigger event as an attendee.

• Offline Events—Put together a one-day mini-conference. Pull together a few regional speakers to speak during the day. Host it at a university, and leverage its resources. You may need to make a professor one of the speakers to make it work. Alternatively, sponsor several local events and ask to speak for a few minutes about what you’re working on at the beginning of the events.

• Speaking Engagements—Contact three local meetup group organizers relevant to your product and ask if you can speak at an upcoming event. Present your company in the context of your personal story. How did you come to be where you are today? How are you uniquely solving a problem with your product? What are your ambitious plans? Alternatively, pitch a talk at a regional conference.

• Community Building—Join three online forums where your customers hang out and engage on at least twenty threads on each. Do this over a month so you don’t look spammy. Similarly, don’t just plug your product directly; truly engage as a useful member of the community. Include references to your product where appropriate and in your signature. Alternatively, start putting together your own community using an online forum tool.