Traction: How to Find Your First Customers
This Friday ->Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg [3 min reading]
On Startup Salad I break down a business book’s key takeaways in a simple, digestible format, just like a good salad!
Hey, it’s Fede!
You can work on your product for a month or 10 years, but things get real when it’s time to go to market and get traction.
And yep, it’s tough.
From what I’ve seen, many founders go with the first strategy that pops into their head.
BEEP, MISTAKE!
There are tons of traction strategies out there.
I listed them all below. 👇
Today's book: Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg
The book isn’t philosophical, it’s super practical. And I loved that.
Let’s start!
Pssst: Every time you see a🥗 it means the takeaway is very hot!
How important is traction for a startup?
The book starts with a bold take: “founders should spend 50% of their time on traction, even before building a prototype”.
It also lists 19 different traction channels you can try.
Yeah… 19 is a lot.
You’ll find all of them in the book, but I’ve picked 5 underrated ones (no Google Ads or SEO, we’ve all seen those) that can be real game changer for your startup.
Ways to Get Traction for Your Startup
1. Targeting Blogs 🥗
When you're just starting out, you don’t have much budget, but you do need to make noise.
Find niche blogs, subreddits, or any kind of community forum. Even anonymously, start talking about the problem you're solving.
Find others who have it, too. Then, slowly introduce your solution and bring people toward what you’re building.
👉 Pro: It's basically free, and the leads you get are usually super high quality
💡 Cons: It takes time, sometimes a lot
2. Traditional PR (e.g. newspapers)🥗
Startups often forget about old-school media. But they’re still incredibly effective.
Not only because people still read them, but because these sites have huge traffic and if your project gets linked there, it’s great for your SEO.
Start by targeting smaller papers first. They're easier to reach, and big papers often discover stories from smaller ones.
👉 Pro: Reach people you’d never find through digital channels
💡 Cons: You can’t fully control what they’ll say about you
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM lets you show up on top of search engines.
In my experience, especially outside of Google, it can offer great ROI particularly if you’re selling a SaaS tool directly from your site.
It’s also great for identifying which keywords work best, and can help you shape your long-term communication strategy.
👉 Use it for: quick validation and keyword testing
💡 Cons: Not a fit for every type of project
4. Email Marketing
Collect emails. Collect as many as you can: on your site, through blog content, at live events (if you are in EU just make sure you follow General Data Protection Regulation “GDPR” rules).
But heads up: email marketing doesn’t work that well with cold mailing.
It does work wonders with follow-ups like when someone has already interacted with you or your product, and you’re giving them that extra nudge.
👉 Pro: High conversion rate
💡 Cons: Takes time and effort to do it right (especially with GDPR)
5. Engineering as Marketing 🥗
If your product has features A, B, C, and D, build A, make it free, and put it out there.
Let future customers engage with it while you work on the rest. It will help a lot to find the first customers.
Investors love this, too, because it shows early traction and clarity of execution.
👉 Pro: One of the best ways to make your product known
💡 Cons: Requires at least some development effort
This is what I found most interesting in the book.
Let me know what you think!
The guidelines you need to build your startup:
See you next Friday,
Federico Lorenzon
I can see you are trying your own advice by coming here and sharing your solutions and building a community, you are good keep it going. Im trying to do the same but my blog its in spanish, good luck!