Concept
Traction channel
A traction channel is a repeatable way of reaching and acquiring customers. Traction catalogues nineteen, and its authors argue that most failed startups never found one, having spent their time on the product instead.
Weinberg and Mares interviewed more than forty founders and open their book with a blunt observation: almost every failed startup has a product; what it lacks is traction. Their first rule is the fifty percent rule: from day one, half the founder's time goes to product and half to traction, because the traction work is what tells you whether the product is worth building, and because channels take longer to find than anyone expects. The nineteen channels range from viral loops, search ads, SEO, content and email to the ones founders forget: engineering as marketing, business development, sales, existing platforms, trade shows, offline events, speaking, community building. Each has its own economics and its own moment; a channel that is cheap when nobody uses it becomes expensive when everybody does. The point of naming them is that the founder stops treating marketing as a mood and starts treating channels as experiments with a cost per customer.
A real-life example
A founder in Ankara selling time-tracking software to architecture firms had built for eight months and marketed for none. Under the fifty percent rule she gave every afternoon to traction and tested three channels. Search ads and cold email brought a trickle. The one that worked was speaking: a twenty-minute talk on billing for hours at a monthly meeting of the city's architects produced more trial accounts than three months of ads.
How to use it
- 1Split your week in half from now on, product and traction, and treat a week where traction got one day as a week the product was built for nobody.
- 2Write down all nineteen channels and note next to each what it would cost you to test it; you will find two or three you had never considered.
- 3Measure every channel in customers acquired and what each one cost, and drop any channel that only produces attention.