Finding the right words.

Jumping the gun.

Earlier today there was a post on Startup North on the merits of the book Traction by the founder of DuckDuckGo.

I read the book a while ago and found it lacking. It seemed to be more of a compilation of blog posts from other authors and anecdotal examples of businesses and how they solved the coveted ‘one channel to rule them all’ problem. Once that channel was saturated, rinse and repeat.

The problem in SaaS being CAC < LTV. CAC = cost of acquisition or what you spend to acquire a user/customer. LTV = lifetime value of a customer or what revenue you generate per customer before they head out the exit.

The book itself; at least to me lacked substance. It simply laid out all possible market channels 1–19 (some with significant overlap) as ‘traction’ channels or places to hunt/scavenge or attract people to your product so they can signup, buy or just do something. Thus proving that your product as value. The content seemed to repeat most of what had already been said or done like: Dropbox , Airbnb cross posting on CraigsList, PayPal paying early users to signup or Hotmails email signature.

The framework called the Bullseye Framework is to test these channels — all of them and focus on the ones that show promise. For example, try Google Ads, Facebook Ads and sponsor a blog post on a medium sized blog in your niche. Measure which one works best in terms of effort/spend vs return and go all in.

I read the seminal book — ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ and one of the core tenants is not to criticize or otherwise express your viewpoints too vehemently thus offending the other person. But I did just that:

I am sorry but I think that book is a waste of time. It seems to be written more as a personal branding/DuckDuckGo awareness piece then an actual book. The content is all pulled from blogs and other places. The concepts are the same as anyone would know. The channels are generic. Viral Marketing isn’t a distribution/marketing channel IMO. Some products lend them selves to such things, others don’t. You can facilitate it but its not a channel, more so a by product perhaps. If you read Andrew Chens blog or visited Neil Patel’s blog or Moz then all these concepts have been laid out there before. The problem with the book and the ‘framework’ is that it does not present anything value or original. It takes existing digital/online/growth (whatever you call it) practices and repeats them in the same order. Word for word.. I have the utmost respect for DuckDuckGo and I am a huge user but after the first few chapters I skimmed and came out feeling extremely meh. No offence intended to anyone who might be a fan. Just my personal opinion. There’s also the ‘high tempo testing’ that I came across on GH that falls under the same bucket IMO.

I might have missed something or misread it but that’s what I came away with after checking the book out. To be fair I did read it a while ago.

It was some what of a word vomit on my part. What I should have done is asked ‘Why did you find the book valuable? I thought it was a decent read but a little below exceptions’.

The OP was kind enough to answer my email and explain his perspective and I paraphrase; as a founder the book laid out the basic framework of what the marketing team is doing/should be doing. In doing so it gave the the founder a primer and a framework to gauge and understand the marketing teams work better and thus when possible add value. More importantly it was systematic approach to the problem, ensuring marketing/growth got its seat at the table (much like design)

Agreed.

In Zen there’s a concept called the beginners mind — seeing everything for the first time. I have spent some time doing marketing for technology startups and thus only viewed the book and its content from my perspective. For someone not familiar with those things, it saves a considerable amount of time and effort; to go to disparage places to find answers and really establish a baseline of what is out there and how its supposed to work and how you approach the problem.

Imagine starting from scratch with no direction as to where to go.

There’s a significant discussion in the technology about everyone having the basic literacy to be able to understand code. Perhaps not to build the next OS but enough to empathize with those writing the code and also create a keeper respect for what code can and in some cases can’t do.

The same case perhaps can be made for marketing. Often it is treated as an after thought and not a core business function. Partly marketing is to blame. Historically marketing has been about abstracts and not analytical. Perhaps to differentiate Marketing 2.0 for the web, there’s phrases like Growth which by itself implies growing ‘a metric’ hence it’s measurable, otherwise there is no way to prove that growth is actually happening.

We built it, they will come, from where? We know not.

The technology ecosystem is built upon code of varying lengths, complexity and languages so there’s no question about product being the front and centre. Most founders are engineers who have a need something that does not exist or isn’t quite the same. So they take it upon themselves to solve their own problem, finding other kindred spirits along the way. They can build out what their vision of the future is.

I’d argue, marketing/sales and business functions play a vital role. There’s no excuse for not having a good solid product that delivers the fundamental value. That’s half the equation. The other half is figuring out who exactly those people are and what is the best way to reach them. This takes many forms — including but not limited to the distribution/marketing channels laid out in the book.

I approached the book from my own experiences — I’ve been trying different channels and juggling excel sheets so I expected a deeper dive into the merits, concepts and perhaps personal examples. The book seemed to be targeted at people in the industry but I was wrong.

After all there are no silver bullets in marketing. Too often we chase what the next person did, without realizing our business, problems, niche and product is unique to itself. It’s always a good idea to know what works for other people, especially if they’re in the same space as you but it’s a bad idea to expect it’ll work for you.

It does have its merits for those approaching digital/online marketing space for the first time. Perhaps more so for those running business to lay a framework and foundation for what to expect and how to approach it. As an educational/primer for anyone dipping their toes into marketing/growth the book might make sense.

What I hope for the most is that marketing gets a seat with at the table.

As for my own comments — I still stand by them. But perhaps different words would have sufficed.