“Poor distribution – not product – is the number one cause of failure.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction:
A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
Startups fail for a bunch of reasons. Either from lack of funds, non-innovative products, inadequate frameworks, and the list goes on. According to Startup Genome's 2019 report, 11 out of 12 startups fail. The main reason they fail is that startups, in essence, a business experiment with potential. It means that real startups are prone to failure by definition. They are testing assumptions, and it's very likely these assumptions are wrong. The more innovative the startup, the riskier the assumptions it's testing, the more likely it is to fail. However, researchers didn't design these cold statistics to discourage entrepreneurs but encourage them to work smarter and harder.
Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares,
TRACTION: HOW ANY STARTUP CAN ACHIEVE EXPLOSIVE CUSTOMER GROWTH
Many startups fail because they poorly distributed their products. Numerous fail because they haven’t gained enough traction with customers or cannot cope with the competition, which seems reasonable. But some startups, even after successfully traversing market challenges, still don’t manage to survive. It’s because they’re traction deficient.
One of the most stressful parts of sustaining and growing a business is getting people to know that their company exists and keeping customers happy enough to recommend their product or service to others. Gabriel Weinberg’s Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth marketing book focuses on finding the right traction channel and provides a guide on how to attract customers consistently. It introduces the concept of Traction Testing to determine which traction channel works best at that moment in time as part of the Bullseye framework in accelerating your business forward. The book emphasizes splitting the founder’s time in 50/50 between these two responsibilities: A, focus on the product and everything to build the product and service. B, constantly ponder marketing and plan long-term strategy, from ideal customers to address them. The marketing channels to use and find ways early to get in touch with potential customers to collect their feedback, gather their opinions, and lead the product in the right direction. Weinberg created the Bullseye Framework to find the channel that will boost traction. A three-step framework aimed at hitting bullseye — the one traction channel at the center of the target to unlock the next growth stage.
David Kemmerer is the co-founder of CryptoTrader.Tax, a cryptocurrency tax software built for both traders and accountants to automate its reporting process. Thousands of CPAs and consumers use the platform today, and the team recently partnered up with Intuit TurboTax to expand crypto-reporting into the mainstream.
Today, CryptoTrader.Tax has more than 30,000 users worldwide to help them automate their cryptocurrency tax reporting. They partnered with major software companies, including Inuit TurboTax, to bring crypto tax reporting capabilities to the mainstream. It became a foundational piece of infrastructure within the crypto industry.
Entrepreneurship changed Kemmerer's life; it enabled him to leave the '9 to 5' world at a young age and live at his terms.
― David Kemmerer is the co-founder of CryptoTrader.Tax
Before CryptoTrader.Tax, his first-ever company was College Cards. A game card company similar to Cards Against Humanity, but with a twist: David customized all of the cards’ content for specific colleges and universities. He launched the first version of College Cards at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. It became successful that the University’s lawyers hunted him down for trademark infringement and demanded that to shut down the game. Even though it failed, Kemmerer was grateful for the experience. Through College Cards, he learned about the pure magic of combining the internet with witty marketing tactics to make money online. Thus, it contributed to his knowledge in launching CryptoTrader.Tax. Upon launching, Kemmerer used Traction’s Bullseye Framework to find CryptoTrader’s potential without spending too much money, time, and effort.
Traction can help startups to develop strategies for attracting customers and ensuring product-market fit. The book is for marketers, founders, aspiring CEOs, and businesses that could use some tweaking or anyone else interested in attracting customers. Traction best suits teams that overly focus on product development at the cost of early marketing efforts.
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