Quote
“Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don't have is traction.”— Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares, in Traction (2015) · Traction →
Why it was said
Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares open Traction with this finding from their interviews with founders across dozens of companies. It is the reason the book is about channels rather than products.
What it actually means
Founders spend their attention on building because building is what they know, and the book's data says the product is rarely what killed them. What killed them was that nobody found it: no channel was tested, or one was assumed and never measured. The sentence moves half the founder's time, from day one, to the question of how customers will arrive, and the rest of the book is a method for testing nineteen channels cheaply.
How to use it
- 1Spend half your time on traction from the start: pick three channels, run a cheap test on each, and measure.
- 2When you catch yourself adding a feature, ask whether the last customer came from a channel you can repeat.