Hey, it's Rick Kettner here. And in this video, we're
gonna talk about "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. This book is ideal if you're
starting a new business, you're launching a new product or service or, if you have an existing
business and you're just looking for ways to attract more customers. Now, if you're interested in learning more about how to build and grow your business, then I recommend that you
subscribe to the channel here on YouTube and turn on notifications so that you don't miss
out on future videos. But, let's get into it. I wanna cover three of my
favorite insights from this book. And a little bit later in the video, we'll probably talk about
who this book is ideal for and if it's the right book for you. Now, insight number one from the book is focus on marketing right from day one. This is something that I talk about a lot here on the channel, because
it's incredibly important that we take time to focus on marketing right from the very
beginning of our business. I know as entrepreneurs,
especially if you're involved in actually creating or
conceiving of the product idea, it's incredibly tempting
to focus all of your energy on building out the product,
coming up with the brand name and getting everything ready, and then treating marketing
as an afterthought. Something that you do
after the product is ready. But the fact is the number one reason why most businesses fail is
they fail to attract customers. They often bring a product
to market, but they fail to actually attract enough
customers to the product. So, it's really important,
not only to focus on marketing right from day one, but I liked
the way that they focus on and emphasize in the book
splitting your time 50/50 between these two responsibilities. A, focused on the product
and everything to do with building out the product and service. And then B, always be
thinking about marketing and your long-term strategy. Everything from who is your ideal customer to how you can actually
get in front of them, the marketing channels that you would use, and also finding ways early in the process to get in touch with potential customers to get their feedback,
to get their opinions, and to make sure that
you're moving your product in the right direction. Because the last thing that you wanna do is spend a small fortune, a
bunch of time, energy and money on building something only to find out that either nobody's
interested or that the product is not as tailored to
the customers out there as it could be. So it's really, really important, not just to focus on
marketing from the beginning, but to actually split your time evenly between the two and treat marketing as a core fundamental
aspect of your business and to really emphasize that. And one other thing I
just wanted to mention, and I've talked about
this year on the channel, but it's really important. As you're talking with early customers, not only do you wanna be
paying close attention to what they like about the product and trying to emphasize those features as you continue to iterate the product, but you also wanna focus on
the language that they use when talking about their
problems, challenges, frustrations, or whatever it is that you're helping
resolve with your product. And you also wanna see how
they talk about your product and how they describe it to back to you and perhaps to other people that might be in on the conversation. Because ultimately when it
comes time to put together your marketing, you wanna use their words. You wanna speak their
language rather than trying to educate them on how you
talk about the product. So it's very important to do that. Okay, insight number two, find the most effective marketing channel. This is another thing that
I talk about quite a bit here on the channel. And specifically I reference
the bullseye framework which comes from this book. This is a four step
process that you can use to select and execute on the
best marketing opportunities for your business. And this is really, really important because in the grand scheme of things, all the different marketing
channels out there, there might be a handful three or four that are far better than the rest. In fact, there might be one channel that is far more effective than two, three and four combined. So, it's really important
that you do what you can to identify the best marketing
opportunity for your business and the bullseye framework, it's something that I reference, like I say,
often here on the channel, it's a four step process. The first step is to
brainstorm marketing ideas for all the different
marketing channels out there that seem interesting to you. This book happens to cover 19
different marketing channels, and it covers in quite detail. Now, I also have put a
video up on my channel here on YouTube that covers 33
different marketing channels that you can use to attract customers. It was inspired by this book and some other resources out there. And, I don't go nearly as in
depth and an as in detail, as this book, I just quickly
recap 33 different strategies. So, you'll definitely
wanna still read this book if you want more detail
on the 19 that they cover. But the idea here behind the first step in the bullseye framework
is to focus on each of these channels and pretend you live
in an alternative universe where you have to use
one specific channel, work your way down the
list and assume, okay. If I absolutely had to
use this one channel, let's say hosting live events, how would you use that channel
to promote your business? Spend 10, 20 minutes coming
up with a realistic scenario of how you would use that specific channel and work your way down the list, cover each and every channel
that you can think of. Or like I say, reference
the video that I posted here on the channel covering 33
different marketing opportunities that you can pursue. Brainstorm them, not
because you're gonna pursue all these channels at once, that would spread your
efforts way too thin, but, this is just an exploratory process. You just wanna see what
you could come up with if you were forced to use
any one of these channels, just as an exercise to
brainstorm interesting ideas. Step two in the framework is to select three to five of the
most promising options, narrow down the list and
really focus on the ones that seem most appropriate
for your business. And the name of the game here is speed. Especially if you're a start-up business and you need to find the
one channel that's gonna be hyper-effective for your
business, you wanna find the channel that can
attract customers quickly, that can attract customers profitably and ideally enough customers to actually make an impact
for you with your business. So, select three to five
of the most promising, and then you move to step three, which is perform inexpensive tests. And this is the step
that it's incredibly easy to skip over as an entrepreneur. I know myself, it's really
tempting to just look at the list and say, okay, here are three
or four that seem promising. I'll figure that out later, I'm gonna go back to
focusing on the product. But the reality is if we don't
test the marketing channels, A, we don't know if
they're really gonna work. And if we're actually gonna
be able to attract customers and B, we can't actually identify which is the best opportunity. So, the idea here is to
perform inexpensive tests, depending on the size of your project that might be 500 bucks, that might be 1000 dollars per channel. And let's say one of the channels was running a Facebook ad campaign. Well, you would perform
an inexpensive campaign, test it over a few days. And the main thing
you're trying to identify is A, are there enough customers
to make things interesting and to be worth your time and B, trying to get a sense
of, are you confident that you could make this a
profitable marketing channel if you were to focus on optimizing it, improving your ad copy,
improving your website or landing page and just optimizing the whole marketing funnel in general. So, you don't wanna obsess
about optimization here. You just wanna get a sense of,
are there enough customers? And if you were to spend
more time and energy optimizing things, is it likely
that you could be profitable in converting those
prospects into customers? So that's step three. Step four is pretty simple. You look at all your tests and you choose the one most promising channel that seems best for your business. And this is very important
because especially as a start-up, it's really important
that you do not spread your efforts too thin, that
you focus all of your time and energy and the time
and energy of anybody else on your team around really
mastering one marketing channel. This is a huge differentiator
for businesses. If you can have a founder, a
co-founder, or a lead marketer, that's an absolute master
at one marketing channel, it gives your business incredible
strength and confidence. So, as quickly as possible,
once you've identified a really promising marketing opportunity, you wanna hone in on that
and focus all of your time and energy on maximizing the
potential of that channel. And eventually, once you
hit diminishing returns or the point at which
spending more time and energy wouldn't necessarily
give you more results, you can pull away from that channel, leave your efforts as is
and restart the process and find the next marketing opportunity to expand your business. You'll still support the original channel, and obviously you try not to exhaust it, but once you hit diminishing returns and it's not really worth
ramping up your ad spend or ramping up your amount of time involved in trying to optimize it, then you find the next
best marketing channel and restart the process. So, this is a very powerful
and simple framework that I refer to quite
often here on the channel, but one of my favorite
insights from the book and something that I strongly
recommend that you use. Okay, insight number three, identify your critical
path and stick to it. The idea here, the critical path concept is you wanna identify where you are today and where you really need to be to feel much more confident
about your business. This is especially important
if you're in a start-up, because this is a life or death situation, you need to figure out is
your business gonna work or is it not gonna work because
you need to get really clear on what your traction goal is? What measurement, what
metric do you have to achieve to know that your business is
moving in the right direction? It might be based on revenue, might be based on total
number of customers. If you're in a situation where you're taking on investor funding, it might be based on hitting
some kind of a metric that indicates confidence
to your investors, that you're moving in the right direction. But at the end of the day, you wanna clearly define
what your traction goal is. And then the critical path
is the most direct route from where you are today, to where you wanna be in the future. And the idea here is you
identify your critical path and then you stick to it. You do not deviate. And what I mean by that
is as entrepreneurs, especially like I mentioned earlier, when we're involved and invested
in creating the product, it's very tempting to build out
things like vanity features, features that we wanna build,
that we like to engineer. We wanna create and add into the product, but don't necessarily
move the needle forward for our business. And so, if there are features like this, or if there are activities
or projects or anything else, any other waste in the business, things that are being
done that do not take you along the line to where you need to be, you need to strip those things away. And often here on the channel, I talk about how you don't
want to overly obsess about metrics and generally
in business that's very true, but when you're a brand new start-up, it's very important because this is a life or death situation for
the business as a whole, that you're hyper-focused
on getting to that point where the business is more stable. Maybe it's cashflow neutral,
maybe it's cashflow positive. Maybe you can hire that extra person that you're desperately needing to take the business to the next level, whatever it is, you
need to get super clear, not only for yourself
in terms of leadership, but with the entire team. And you need to collectively
hold each other accountable, to focus all of your time
and energy on getting to that traction goal,
to closing the distance and actually getting to that next level. This is incredibly important,
especially for start-ups. So if that's your situation, if you're starting a new business, get very clear on where you need to be in order to take your
business to the next level and to have that extra level of confidence and then avoid any waste, typical things that slip through or things like trying to
over optimize the business over process, map it. So for example, trying to create processes for everything that you're accomplishing and trying to make sure
that you're future-proofing the business, none of that stuff matters when you're just trying to figure out, does this business even work. So, super important idea. And one of my favorite takeaways, favorite insights from the book. Let me quickly recap the three things. So number one, focus on
marketing right from day one. Number two, find the most
effective marketing channel and number three, identify
your critical path and stick to it. And those are just three
of my favorite insights from the book, there are a
lot more things in the book. I didn't even talk about the
19 different traction channels. I focused on the different
frameworks and concepts, 'cause for me personally,
having some experience with the various marketing channels, I found that stuff more interesting, but for you, the 19
different marketing channels might be as important,
or if not more important in terms of the value of this book. So, definitely check this out. If you're starting a new business, if you're launching a
new product or service, or if you've got an existing
business and you're just looking for ways to attract
even more customers. Quick note, there are at
least two different books by the same title. There's the book by Gino Wickman. And then of course, there's this book, both are very good books, but obviously if you're wanting to learn more about what we're talking about here, you want the one by Gabriel
Weinberg and Justin Mares. But, that's it for this video. If you enjoyed the video,
please click the like button down below to let me know. It also helps promote the video to other people here on YouTube. And of course, if you're interested in learning more about how to
build and grow your business, then I recommend that you
subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so that you don't miss
out on future videos. And if you have any
questions about this book, or, if you have
recommendations for other books that you think that I should
be covering in future videos, definitely let me know down
in the comments section below and otherwise, thank you
for watching the video. And I look forward to seeing
you in the next video.
