Traction

What Hacker News says

1. stochtinkererApr 2026
   check the book Traction of Gabriel Weinberg. brainstorm 5-6 channel experiments and test them fast (e.g. sales, content marketing, seo), preferably within 2 weeks.

   Keep testing new hypotheses until you find 1-2 channels that work best, and then completely double down on these channels.

   just a heads up, for your first 5-10 clients try to focus on warm leads, its much easier than going cold

   good luck

   thread
2. whynotmaybeDec 2025
   This book has some often overlooked insights :

   Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

   ISBN 0241242533

   thread
3. zigcBenxApr 2025
   I am a full stack developer and founder and as you may expect I found myself lacking lots of business knowledge when I first started with my startup.

   So far this are the most valuable books that I read:

   1. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares 2. Hooked by Nir Eyal 3. Traffic Secrets by Russel Brunson 4. Contagious by Jonah Berger 5. How to win friends and Influence people by Dale Carnegie

   One thing I've learned is that depending on where you are in your journey—whether in life or business—all of these books are worth revisiting.

   What about you guys? What do Hacker News people read?

   Show morethread
4. danjlSep 2024
   Check out the book Traction, to get a bunch of free marketing channels and a strategy. My favorite is to go after the bloggers that are read by your target customer community.

   https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

   thread
5. JugurthaJul 2024
   The first app teaches you to find users before you build the second app.

   Take a look at a book called "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" by DuckDuckGo's founder Gabriel Weinberg.

   He goes into various channels on how to get users and improve the product.

   thread
6. JugurthaJul 2024
   >The sort of skills that would eventually allow me to run my own company/team/org.

   These are different things. Running your own company more often than not implies you have started the company, and the skills you need to start and run a company are different in and of themselves, let alone the fact they're different from running a team in an established company/organization where you never think about how the power is still on.

   In smaller companies and startups, the opportunity to learn is yours if you want it and the incentive to do so is survival. The company is small enough that you can, if you're so inclined, be involved in and learn about everything.

   I answered a few questions on some topics you might find relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482961

   There are a few replies there about communication and alignment. More (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288605)

   A FAANG is so large that the acronym is just five letters, and procuring whiteboard markers to them could be the biggest contract another company ever had.

   What you want is to expand the spectrum of your involvement or "ownership". One way of doing that is to learn to sell into the enterprise.

   Imagine you are a startup and you want to sell your product to [insert your company]. How would you go about it? It teaches you many things: What problem does it solve? For whom is it a problem? Why is it a problem? Why now? Are they aware it is a problem? Have they tried solving that problem? What outcome and why wasn't it solved? What does winning look like (success criteria)? For whom? Who are the owners and stakeholders? Who has the budget? Who is the competition [it could be internal competition]? Will this make or break someone's career if it's a success/failure? Who can torpedo the effort? Who's green-light do you need? Who's non red-light do you need? How does that align with the company's strategy? How do you scope that solution? What features are table stakes? How do you manage the product's roadmap (what not to build and what to build and why)? Does everyone know why they're doing what they're doing and can they make decisions unsupervised? What's important for each one at the table (legal, security, IT, infra, finance, sales, marketing, etc.)? You'll learn how to reason from each one's perspective (even make their own case for them) in order to orchestrate and find ways to drive the effort forward.

   All these will be really useful because, even if you are still at that company, you'll have to learn how to do it to get buy in for whatever project or product or project you're working on or direction of the product you think is right, to get the resources you need, get the people you need (or to prevent adding more people, both are important).

   Do you hang out with people starting start-ups? They surely talk about the problems they're facing and you could learn a lot brainstorming with them? Talking with people starting different startups exposes you to a variety of problems, solutions, and thought processes. You could notice patterns.

   A few books that could come in handy:

   - "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" - Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo's founder).

   - David Skok's "For Entrepreneurs" - https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ and https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/zero-to-100/

   - "The Lean Product Playbook" - Dan Olsen

   - EnterpriseReady - https://www.enterpriseready.io/#features

   - "Lean B2B" - Étienne Garbugli

   - "High Output Management" - Andrew Grove

   - MEDDIC sales (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify/Implicate the pain, Champion). That's a known sales framework

   - Michael Dearing on Pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20160318134158/https://www.heavy...

   - "Predictable Revenue" - Aaron Ross

   - "Founding Sales" - Peter Kazanjy (I haven't read that one but I've heard good things)

   - "When software and people mix" - Gail Goodman - Business of software 2012 (https://vimeo.com/54076835)

   - "Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business" - Jason Cohen at Microconf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw

   - How to Build a Startup - Steve Blank on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwxTw4SYaPnxzSuovATB...)

   - Marc Andreessen's archive, but start with this: "The only thing that matters". https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

   Whatever you do, you know the whole customer development and product market fit and ensuring there's a market and that you have distribution? Most people know that and still, the temptation to build before is strong. That's why I started my list with Gabriel Weinberg's "Traction".

   All the best. Happy to exchange throughout your quest.

   Show morethread