Would you re-write a book that has sold 35,000 copies in its first year? That is exactly what Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, did with his book,Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth. This is an excerpt from next weeks podcast with Gabriel as we help launch the new version of the book next week. And as you will hear in the podcast, this book is just not for start-ups.
Joe: I think it’s so interesting about the book is that you challenged a developer and entrepreneur. I think saying that “You need to start getting traction and put as much effort and time into that as you do developing a product.” They need to go hand in hand. Did I interpret that right?
Gabriel: Yeah, that is exactly right and in this version, we focus on that. Pretty much all these problems that people have, have been psychological. It’s essentially getting out of your comfort zone, and this one is probably the most tricky. If you consider the product as a leaky bucket, so when you first start building your product, it’s very leaky and you pour customers at the top and they just fall out. What entrepreneurs take away from that I shouldn’t do any marketing yet because I’m just going to waste that time and money. But, that’s actually wrong because those fresh eyes, those fresh customers coming in are actually telling you where the leaks are. It’s what you won’t be able to get by just asking your beta customers because they’re too close to you.
Additionally, by focusing on these kinds of traction or marketing effort, you’re learning 3 things. You’re learning what messaging is really resonating with new fresh eyes, what niche you should focus on and which of these 19 channels you should use. So, when you actually launch, you can just hit the ground running versus what normally happens is people just launch hoping that they’ll get customers. That doesn’t happen. Then, they start doing this scatter gun approach. Then, they realize that their product is actually, it was still leaky. And so, all of this could have been solved if they started it right from the beginning.
CAP-Do (More Info): What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers. It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.
Lean Marketing eBooks (More Info): Excerpt from the Lean Marketing House