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Concept

Traction channel

A traction channel is a repeatable way of reaching and acquiring customers, one of nineteen that Traction catalogues, and the thing most dead startups never found, having spent all their time on the product instead.

Weinberg and Mares interviewed founders across dozens of companies and found the same shape in the failures: a product existed, and nobody had spent as much on reaching customers as on building it. 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 Izmir selling accounting software to freelancers had built for eight months and marketed for none. Under the fifty percent rule she gave every afternoon to traction. The channel that eventually worked was not advertising but existing platforms: a free plug-in for the invoicing tool freelancers already used, which brought in more customers in a month than the previous eight had.

How to use it

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 3Measure every channel in customers acquired and what each one cost, and drop any channel that only produces attention.