Author
Justin Mares
The Traction co-author who went on to build consumer brands with the channels he wrote about.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Justin Mares co-wrote Traction with Gabriel Weinberg after working in growth roles at technology startups, including one acquired by Rackspace, where finding customers was the whole job. The book, first self-published and then released by a major publisher in 2015, gave founders the catalogue of nineteen channels and the Bullseye method for testing them.
He then applied the book to his own companies. In 2015 he co-founded Kettle & Fire, a bone-broth brand, and later Perfect Keto, growing both largely through the content, search and partnership channels the book describes. More recently he co-founded TrueMed, a company working on paying for health products with pre-tax medical accounts.
He writes and speaks about startup distribution and consumer brands, and Traction remains the book he is best known for.
The signature
Mares's contribution to Traction is the practitioner's voice: the how-to inside each channel chapter, the checklists, and the insistence on measuring a channel in customers and cost rather than attention. His later companies are the book's method run in public.