Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth

Traction is basically quantitative evidence of customer demand.

The best talks I’ve ever seen are where each slide is essentially a seven-minute story with a beginning, middle, and end. Once you get good at that, and you have these canned slides, you can change a sixty-minute talk to a twenty-minute talk just by taking slides out.

Because it is difficult to rank high for competitive (fat-head) terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on the long tail. With this strategy, you bundle long-tail keywords together to reach a meaningful number of customers.

Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.