3. “A startup is a company designed to grow
fast… The only essential thing is growth.
Everything else we associate with startups
follows from growth.”
- Paul Graham (YC)
Why you should care?
10. An essential part of your Biz model
“A business model describes the rationale of
how an organization creates, delivers, and
captures value
- Business Model Generation (Book)
11. Traction is…
“…basically quantitative evidence of customer
demand. So if you’re in enterprise software, [initial
traction] may be two or three early customers who
are paying a bit; if you’re in consumer software the
bar might be as high as hundreds of thousands of
users. It’s the [U.S.] Supreme Court definition of
porn…. You’ll know it when you see it.”
- Naval Ravikant (Angellist)
14. Product-Market-Fit (PMF)
„… being in a good market with a
product that can satisfy that market“
- Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz)
„40% or more of your users would be
„very dissapointed“ without our product“
- Sean Ellis (Qualaroo/GrowthHackers)
16. Life before and after Product-Market-Fit
Before PMF After PMF
Exploration
Experiment
Initial Traction
Often „Manual“
Growth Hacking
Optimizing
Scaling
Automate
Death
„Must-Have-Product“
18. Tips out there might not apply to YOU
Fact: ALL channels have been
„proven“ to work for some
companies at a specific time
Flood of information & different
„best practices“
19. Beware of biases
Survivor Bias (typically from Post-PMF companies)
„We we‘re succesful, this channels worked for us“
Your own channel bias
„I don‘t like calling people, but I love using
Facebook, so it is probably the better way to
reach my customers than sales calls.“
20. Truth: Every company is different
Different channels work differently
well for different companies and
industries.
Also most channels work even
differently well for the same company
over time.
21. The present is never like the past
„Law of Shitty Click-Throughs“
Channels change, become
overcrowded, degrade, or
become more expensive over
time
22. That is why prediction is difficult
You can rarely predict which
channel will work best for your
company at particular time and
particular stage
23. In search for a channel
Find channel(s) that will get YOU traction
If no channel works: No PMF?
Explore channels WHILE Product Dev
25. Mindset I – Traction from Start
Growing = getting traction = equally
your „job“ like building a product (in
parallel)
Lessons learned from Traction =>
integrate to Product where possible
26. Mindset II – Measurement
What you measure is what you get
Try to „move the needle“
Users in
Users out
27. Mindset III - Focus
Corporate Marketing = Startup Traction
Building
Traction Building = doing everything (or beeing
on every channel)
Focus
No „free“ channels (you must invest time)
28. Fundamental I – Know Your Customer
Unterstanding your Customers
Unterstanding their world (spent time,
substitutes, competitors, other used services/
products, regulary consumed channels,…)
29. Fundamental II – Metrics
Setting „right“ metrics for your startup
and its current stage
Paid B2B
SaS
Freemium
Mobile
App
Free B2C
Platform
Hardware Search
Engine
Acquistion
Engagement
Bottom-Line
Which metrics would you choose here?
30. Fundamental III – „Right Channel“
Pre-PMF
Creating relatively most acquistions
Moving needle (now)
„Affordable“ / Executable for you
Post-PMF
Acquiring at lower cost than other channels
Acquiring better than competitors
Suiting your Unit-Economics
Repeatable & Scalable
32. Channels II – Do‘s
Understand specific Channel mechanics
Check peers/competitions/industry
Seek out under-utilized channels
Use over-utilized channels more creatively
Re-Test & Re-evaluate channels
Double Down on Winners
33. Channels III – Difference(s)
Demand harvesting VS. Demand generation
Channels with customer intent VS. Channels
with user interruption