Author
Gabriel Weinberg
The DuckDuckGo founder who catalogued the nineteen ways a startup can get customers.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Gabriel Weinberg studied physics at MIT and built and sold an early social-networking site before founding DuckDuckGo in 2008, a search engine built around not tracking its users. He grew it for years from his home in Pennsylvania, largely alone at first, and the search for a way to reach users without a marketing budget was the experience behind his book.
Traction, written with Justin Mares and published in 2015 after an earlier self-published edition, drew on interviews with the founders of Wikipedia, Reddit, Evernote and others to catalogue nineteen traction channels and propose the Bullseye method for choosing among them. It became the standard reference on startup distribution.
In 2019 he co-wrote Super Thinking with Lauren McCann, a guide to mental models, and he continues to run DuckDuckGo as chief executive.
The signature
Weinberg approaches marketing the way a physicist approaches an experiment: enumerate the possibilities, test cheaply, measure, commit. His signature in Traction is the refusal to guess, the insistence that the right channel is found by process rather than instinct, and the fifty percent rule that makes founders start looking on day one.