Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn't the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It's how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That's called traction, and it makes everything else easier-fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you're on the right path. Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You'll learn, for example, how to: Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren't using Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research Weinberg and Mares know that there's no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

GABRIEL WEINBERG is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that emphasizes user privacy by not tracking its users on more than 3 billion searches in 2015. He was previously the cofounder and CEO of Opobox, which was acquired for $10 million in 2006. He lives in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and on Twitter at @yegg.

JUSTIN MARES is the founder of two startups and the former Director of Revenue at Exceptional, a software company that was acquired by Rackspace. He lives in San Francisco, and on Twitter at @jwmares.

www.tractionbook.com

Two successful startup founders offer a comprehensive overview of the various ways startups can achieve strong, sustainable growth, and a guide to choosing the ones that will make the differencce. Why do so many startups fail? According to entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, most failed startups don’t get off the ground not because of a bad product, but because they don’t have enough customers. They make the fatal mistake of putting all their effort into perfecting their product at the cost of reaching out to potential users. Instead, they should be putting half their resources into getting traction.

TRACTION is the essential guide for any startup looking to stay ahead of the curve and start building a user base early in the game. The book offers no one-size-fits-all solution: every startup is unique, so no single method is guaranteed to generate traction. Instead, the authors identify nineteen different traction channels from viral marketing to trade shows, offer insights on how to exploit each one to its fullest potential, and provide a framework to test various channels and identify the best one for any startup.

Drawing on advice from more than 40 successful startup founders and marketers, from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales to American Apparel’s Ryan Holiday, TRACTION is a comprehensive textbook for marketing your way to growth.