Traction

@yegg What are some of the lessons you teach in Traction that you personally leveraged to help grow DuckDuckGo to nearly 10,000,000 queries per day?

@caseya in the book we present a framework called Bullseye to figure out what traction channel (out of 19) to focus on to move the needle for your traction goal (as I painted a bit more in this comment: http://www.producthunt.com/books...). When you reach diminishing returns in that effort, you have to restart the process, either because that channel isn't going to get you to that goal, or your goal was attained and now you have a new one, and the channel won't get you to that goal. At DuckDuckGo, we've gone through that process 6 times, including going through it again right now! In fact, we've even run it more than that because we have a separate traction goal for DuckDuckHack (our open source instant answer platform) where the goal is developer engagement (as opposed to consumer user acquisition). The channels we've ended up focusing on for various steps from 10,000 searches a day to 10,000,000: SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing (my blog, and then micro-sites), social ads (mainly reddit), PR (online and then TV), and Business Development (integrations into Safari & Firefox). All of these have reached diminishing returns and we're essentially back to the traction drawing board, running Bullseye again internally.

@eliotpeper in doing the second edition of Traction we really focused on these mistakes were seeing, especially for people who read the first version, and we saw four broad non-intuitive mistakes: 1) Not starting traction efforts early enough. In the book we offer the 50% rule where you should spend 50% of your time on Traction. Even if people buy into this, however, they generally aren't starting early enough, namely right when they start product development. This is non-intuitive because people feel they're wasting time and money on a leaky bucket product. But the reality is that a steady stream of cold customers really help you figure out where the holes are, what niche to focus on, messaging to use, etc., information you don't get fully from product development and that if you don't get from this early traction effort, usually leads to further rounds of product development after launch. 2) Not considering all channels. People are always asking us what is good for B2B or B2C or SaaS or what have you. All channels have been useful for all types, and in fact, the most useful channels are often the most under-utilized ones in a given scenario, simply because they are less saturated, and less saturated efforts usually lead to better conversions. 3) Not scoping tests well. In the testing phase of our Bullseye framework you are testing 3 of the 19 channels, trying to find one to focus on. People mess this up by trying to do too much with these tests, and moving into more what we'd call optimization. You want to do the minimal amount to validate your assumptions and move on. 4) Not doubling down on one channel. When a test works, our framework calls for solely focusing on it. People mess this up by not dropping the other channels that had moderate outcomes, and this makes intuitive sense because they had some outcomes. However, those outcomes are less promising than the main channel, where this extra effort could be spent to make it even better.

@yegg @eliotpeper Thank you for a thoughtful question and answer!

@harrystebbings Thanks Harry! How did you use it to grow the Twenty Minute VC? Favorite interview... that's a hard one. However, I will say I was blown away by Alex Pachikov's interview about how they leveraged partnerships and new channels to grow. They've done a ton of really, really smart stuff behind the scenes to grow.