Traction

@yegg What are some of the lessons you teach in Traction that you personally leveraged to help grow DuckDuckGo to nearly 10,000,000 queries per day?

@caseya in the book we present a framework called Bullseye to figure out what traction channel (out of 19) to focus on to move the needle for your traction goal (as I painted a bit more in this comment: http://www.producthunt.com/books...). When you reach diminishing returns in that effort, you have to restart the process, either because that channel isn't going to get you to that goal, or your goal was attained and now you have a new one, and the channel won't get you to that goal. At DuckDuckGo, we've gone through that process 6 times, including going through it again right now! In fact, we've even run it more than that because we have a separate traction goal for DuckDuckHack (our open source instant answer platform) where the goal is developer engagement (as opposed to consumer user acquisition). The channels we've ended up focusing on for various steps from 10,000 searches a day to 10,000,000: SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing (my blog, and then micro-sites), social ads (mainly reddit), PR (online and then TV), and Business Development (integrations into Safari & Firefox). All of these have reached diminishing returns and we're essentially back to the traction drawing board, running Bullseye again internally.

@eliotpeper in doing the second edition of Traction we really focused on these mistakes were seeing, especially for people who read the first version, and we saw four broad non-intuitive mistakes: 1) Not starting traction efforts early enough. In the book we offer the 50% rule where you should spend 50% of your time on Traction. Even if people buy into this, however, they generally aren't starting early enough, namely right when they start product development. This is non-intuitive because people feel they're wasting time and money on a leaky bucket product. But the reality is that a steady stream of cold customers really help you figure out where the holes are, what niche to focus on, messaging to use, etc., information you don't get fully from product development and that if you don't get from this early traction effort, usually leads to further rounds of product development after launch. 2) Not considering all channels. People are always asking us what is good for B2B or B2C or SaaS or what have you. All channels have been useful for all types, and in fact, the most useful channels are often the most under-utilized ones in a given scenario, simply because they are less saturated, and less saturated efforts usually lead to better conversions. 3) Not scoping tests well. In the testing phase of our Bullseye framework you are testing 3 of the 19 channels, trying to find one to focus on. People mess this up by trying to do too much with these tests, and moving into more what we'd call optimization. You want to do the minimal amount to validate your assumptions and move on. 4) Not doubling down on one channel. When a test works, our framework calls for solely focusing on it. People mess this up by not dropping the other channels that had moderate outcomes, and this makes intuitive sense because they had some outcomes. However, those outcomes are less promising than the main channel, where this extra effort could be spent to make it even better.

@yegg @eliotpeper Thank you for a thoughtful question and answer!

@harrystebbings Thanks Harry! How did you use it to grow the Twenty Minute VC? Favorite interview... that's a hard one. However, I will say I was blown away by Alex Pachikov's interview about how they leveraged partnerships and new channels to grow. They've done a ton of really, really smart stuff behind the scenes to grow.

@bbalfour Good question. I actually don't find many good books around traction/growth/marketing, which is why blogs (like yours) are so useful to stay current. And why we wanted to write this book. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins was excellent, as was Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. I reference those books quite a bit. Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. For whatever reason, I had a ton of marketing thoughts and ideas when reading 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. Otherwise, I don't think most growth/marketing books have led to fundamental shifts in my thinking about marketing. I think a lot of marketing and growth is following a few principles, understanding a few things about human psychology and rigorously applying them. So that said, I've found psychology, strategy and history books more helpful in terms of rounding out my thinking about marketing.

@bbalfour the one piece that comes to mind that **fundamentally** changed the way I think about it was The Psychology of Human Misjudgement, a speech Charlie Munger (who works with Warren Buffet) gave at Harvard in 1995. The full text is at http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeec... and there is audio at He basically walks through biases, now made more popular by behavioral economics in books like Predictably Irrational and others, but also ties it to marketing. He makes the point that the best marketing efforts generally work by relating emotionally to more than one of these triggers like curiosity, reciprocity, etc.

@eriktorenberg Thanks Erik! Excited to do this.

@kunalslab Great questions. 1. This is a tough one. A lot of it is product-dependent, but one way I think about it is, if a bug or lack of a feature is hurting your conversion rate and adoption in your market more than a new feature that'd bank users, focus on building the feature. For example, at Airbrake (company I ran growth at previously), we had 1 feature that every other competitor had. And, when I asked customers what they wanted, they all wanted this feature. So we built that first. Later, when we heard some customers wanted feature Y but it wasn't a sticking point for new customers interested in the product, we focused on growth-oriented features. Does that make sense? 2. Could you clarify? I think there's a real balance here: adding growth-oriented features can get you a ton of traction, but you likely only want to focus on this once you have a core product that people are responding positively to.

@jwmares Makes a lot of sense. Weigh the growth you could get from a new feature vs. the retention you could if you gave exiting customers a feature they want. For question 2, I was asking what changes your decision making in different stages of the business (0-100 users, 100+, 1000+, etc.)?

@mtufekyapan in the book we enumerate and give primers on all 19 traction channels, and also provide a 3-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which channel to focus on. It's called Bullseye because you're aiming for the center of a target, the center representing the channel that will move you toward your chosen traction goal. Roughly here is the basic approach: Step 0) Get a traction goal. This goal needs to be quantitative and meaningful to your business, often at the beginning around raising funding or getting to profitability, though could be something else. How many customers do you really need to move the needle? Knowing this informs the rest of the framework. Step 1) Brainstorming, or "The Outer Ring: What's Possible". The first real step is to go through all 19 channels and really effectively brainstorm how they could be used for your project. The idea here is to really try to come up with tests of you could use each and every channel to answer how many customers the channel could reasonably bring, at what cost, and if they are the right type of customers? Where this gets messed up is not really focusing on all channels, since we are biased towards some based on our experience, but often the under-utilized channels, those ones we know least about, are the best. Step 2) Testing, or "The Middle Ring: What's Probable". After the first step we encourage looking through the 19 tests you outlined and picking the three that seem the most promising and then literally going out and running those tests. Good middle ring tests should take no longer than 1 month and $1K each; this is testing, not optimization. The goal is to validate your assumptions and really get a sense whether the channel could really move the needle for the traction goal or not. Step 3) Focusing, or "The Inner Ring: What's Working." Assuming one of the middle ring tests was very promising, you drop everything else and really focus on that channel, now really trying to move it to get to your traction goal. This focusing step involves a lot more testing, but within that one channel to uncover strategies and tactics that work best.