How Smart Startups Get More Customers: Q&A with Justin Mares, co-author of Traction

When note-taking and collaboration app Evernote launched in 2007, it was one of the first third-party developers to begin creating applications for the first version of the iPhone, which Apple had released around the same time. So, naturally, when Apple launched the App Store in 2008 as a marketplace for those types of applications, Evernote was also one of the first companies to move all-in on that channel.
That decision proved to be a good one for Evernote, which managed to ride the wave of undivided attention on the App Store to the tune of more than one million users by May 2009.
Most startups would kill for that kind of early traction, but Evernote saw it as just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of sitting back and hoping that its early viral growth would organically fuel even bigger user acquisition numbers, the company chose to take a more creative, aggressive approach to growth.
As Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg recount in their new book, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers, Evernote decided instead to double down on the App Store, releasing different versions of its core app that were branded for specific store audiences (i.e., Evernote Food for recipe collectors, Evernote Peek for students who needed a study aid, etc.). The result: An explosion of exposure that helped drive the company to the more than 100 million users and a $1+ billion valuation it boasts today.
Of course, there’s more to Evernote’s growth than simply a tactical approach to the App Store. But as Mares explained in a recent interview, startups can learn a lot about early traction from the company’s incredible focus and outside-the-box thinking.

“When people try things unsystematically, they’re not doing them as tests, they’re just hoping — and that just doesn’t work today.” — Justin Mares, co-author of Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

A Smarter Approach to Customer Acquisition: Q&A with Justin Mares

What’s the story behind Traction?
Before I wrote the book, I’d founded two startups and worked in business development for another. Across everything I’ve done, the biggest problem I saw startups struggle with wasn’t being able to build a product. It was being able to get customers.
Many of the people I’ve known and spoken with at startups would know how to build a product. They would do all the lean development methods. But then they would struggle to get a couple hundred users. When it came to customer acquisition, they had no idea what to do. That’s a really common challenge for founders, and many end up throwing really unsystematic actions against the wall to see what sticks, just hoping something will work.
Gabe and I met up in Philadelphia, where the startup scene was — and still is — relatively small. We started sharing stories and discussing our experiences and realized we both had been seeing similar things. Traction was what companies were really struggling with. There wasn’t a lot out there in terms of resources or books people could turn to for help with that, so we decided to write the book we were looking for.
Over the course of the next 20 months or so, we wrote the book, and much of the information for it came from interviews with more than 40 founders and growth experts.
Why do entrepreneurs struggle with achieving traction?
For one, it’s fundamentally hard to do. But it’s also harder now than it has been in the past.
What you’re seeing now is a startup landscape with thousands of companies coming out of incubators, getting seed funding, crowdfunding, taking advantage of so many different ways to develop products. With more funding, that means more companies are launching, and that creates a very competitive environment and some pressure to quickly drive user or customer acquisition. As a result, what differentiates successful companies isn’t always the product, but the ability to effectively and efficiently achieve traction.
So, how should entrepreneurs go about doing that?
In the book, we talk about what we call “The Bullseye Framework,” which centers on three key things: Get Smart. Get Focused. Get More Customers. Gabe and I can’t claim ownership of the ideas behind the framework. It’s really the way high growth companies like Dropbox, HubSpot, Lyft, and others have achieved traction.

To break it down, by utilizing the Bullseye Framework, the very best companies first step back and look at their current situation and where they want to go. From there, they brainstorm, focusing on identifying different potential channels they can leverage to get them there. That selection process is key, because ultimately, the channels to get to 1,000 users are going to be very different than the ones you’d use to get to 100,000 users, etc.

There are two other things the best businesses do to achieve traction:

• They look at competitors: What channels are working for other companies in your space? Which are already saturated, and which are competitors not taking full advantage of?
• They look at complimentary industries: Is there something working in another space that you could adapt and apply to yours?

In short, founders should look at everything they can potentially do, pick the most promising option, run tests, and then zero in (and double down on) the most promising results. When people try things unsystematically, they’re not doing them as tests, they’re just hoping — and that just doesn’t work today.
Instead, your approach really needs to be much more informed and targeted. For example: “I want to test content marketing as a channel because there’s not a lot of content out there in our niche/space, or because competitors have had some success with it, but they aren’t doing it well / we could do it better.”
As it relates to traction, what’s the biggest mistake most early and expansion-stage businesses make?
The biggest mistake is twofold: Trying too much at once and giving up on a channel too early.
From my experience in startups and writing this book, most businesses have a scattered approach to growth where they try a bunch of different channels at once. It’s very ad hoc. Not only does that make it very difficult to determine what’s really working and what’s not, it’s also highly unlikely anything will work, because you’re not truly focusing enough energy on it.
I compare it to going to the gym. The person who goes to the gym knowing exactly what their goal is and with an organized and well-thought-out regimen/routine will see far better results than the person who walks in with no plan at all and does a few bench-presses here, a handful of squats there.

The other issue is abandoning channels before they’ve had a chance to fully mature or begin to deliver results. It’s important to keep in mind that any time you try to do something new, you’re almost always going to see worse initial results than doing the things you know and are already good at. You need to stick it through, which is an approach I refer to as “fighting through the suck.”
The other problem is entrepreneurs often don’t focus enough on the things that are working to fully squeeze every last drop of potential out of those channels. They get stuck in an approach that yields initial results and they fail to iterate and brainstorm new ways to get even more traction out of it (like Evernote did).
Once you have a channel working for you, it’s incredibly valuable to get creative and max out the full potential. Going back to the gym analogy, failing to do that is like doing a few bicep curls, noticing that your arms are getting bigger, and then assuming that if you keep doing the exact same exercises with the same weight you’ll eventually evolve into a world-class bodybuilder. That’s not how weightlifting works, and achieving traction in business is no different.

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Photo by: Martin Fisch