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Stanely Mushava Literature Today
For Earthlings coming up for oxygen, the reserve planet is not Mars, but the Internet.

The Internet is a parallel universe complete with news stands, shops, cinemas, schools, clinics, churches, casinos, taxis, brothels, surveillants, terrorists and drug cartels.

Human colonies winded from resource wars, unemployment and worker exploitation have found potentially infinite shelf space for their dreams on the web.

For the enterprising, it is the place to identify gaps, propose solutions, project imperial ambitions and mop up a fortune with the next noise-worthy innovation.

But the problem with this is that the Internet is already occupied by behemoths and flooded by start-ups.

Whatever business idea you will divine into at meditative pre-dawn is bound to be crowded out by a million brands competing for attention web-wide.

It gets worse if you are not a young white man, the default demographics converging at the 21st century Berlin Conference for the scramble and partition of the Internet.

This edition of Literature Today is directed at local start-ups who lack strategic proximity and first-mover advantage, but are out for a stake in this new control room of globalisation.

In recent instalments, we discussed misanthropic implications of the Internet’s incestuous liaisons with corporate and political establishments.

The book under review this week reaches out to start-ups, from e-commerce to apps, with an ideologically agnostic, but generously signposted tool-kit for growth and recognition.

In “Traction: A Start-up Guide to Getting Customers,” noted innovator Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares glean from their successes and failures a step-by-step, easy-to-understand roadmap for building a successful technology company.

Weinberg is the founder of DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine described by Fast Company as “Google’s tiniest and fiercest competitor,” while Mares is the founder of two start-ups.

The DuckDuckGo CEO’s claim to fame is subverting Google’s corporate intelligence practices with an alternative search engine that does not track users.

By projecting privacy as a selling point, hence exploiting Internet users’ insistent reservation with Google, Weinberg has been able to wrest a stake from the technology giant.

He combines the disruptive factor with his experience as an angel investor to share insight on how to gain traction and move from an underdog to a notable.

But the book leans on rigour more than resume. Although their own experiences are featured, Weinberg and Mares build their case from interviews with more than 40 start-up founders and their studies of many more companies for repeatable strategies.

Traction is basically defined as pulling an object along a surface using motive power. In this book, traction is growing your start-up from an idea in your computer to a household phenomenon.

“Traction is the best way to improve your chances of start-up success. Traction is a sign that something is working. If you charge for your product, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it’s a growing user base,” observe the traction evangelists.

“Traction is powerful. Technical, market and team risks are easier to address with traction. Fundraising, hiring, press, partnerships and acquisitions are all easier with traction,” they write.

According to the authors, traction is not merely important for a start-up, but is what defines a start-up. A start-up, for them, is neither a newly formed company nor a venture dabbling in technology.

Rather, it is a company designed to grow fast. Weinberg and Mares simplify traction as growth and name the pursuit of traction as what defines a start-up.

The book names 19 traction channels, including viral marketing, public relations, unconventional PR, social and display ads, search engine optimisation, content marketing, email marketing, targeting blogs, business development, offline events and community building.

Each chapter explains a traction channel in accessible prose and winds up with a list of takeaways. The clarity and brevity of the book seems to anticipate the readership, anti-social coders known to impatient with our lesser alphabet.

The duo laments that most founders limit themselves by deploying only the traction channels that they are already familiar with.

But these are saturated in most cases and specialising with them at the exception of venturesome and gainful possibilities short-sells the start-up.

There are traction channels that work best at a particular point in the shelf life of a start-up, but these should be determined by tests rather than educated guesses. The early chapters discuss ways of experimenting, focusing and synthesising growth channels.

The duo also discusses “the product trap,” a mistake whereby start-ups focus on developing a great product without putting much thought into distribution strategies. In such cases, the merits of the product, obvious as they may be to the developer, remain detained in his or her computer.

Some products fail to sustain not because they are not useful, but because the developers exclusively focus on technical aspects at the demise of the social processes.

“Many entrepreneurs think that if you build a killer product, your customers will beat a path to your door. We call this line of thinking The Product Trap: the fallacy that the best use of your time is always improving your product. In other words, ‘if you build it, they will come’ is wrong,” the duo points out.

Technology visionaries prefer to bolt their doors and work in isolation, connected to their own mystic pipe, who knows where. This, according to the authors, is dark counsel.

Rather, building the product and promoting it concurrently will allow you to gauge customer tastes and incorporate them into the product.

Pursuing traction in parallel with the creative process may slow down the product, but it creates the base necessary for popular reception once the product is finished and it prolongs the shelf life of the first edition.

Establishing the social proof of the product to potential customers is emphasised in most of the traction channels. One of the more familiar ways is public relations, traditional or unconventional.

Social proof dismantles barriers to belief and primes the audience to embrace your product, even if only to catch on. The authors devote several chapters on getting press, popular endorsement and funding for your product.

These includes packaging the killer pitch for reporters, starting from smaller blogs or local press which mainline echo chambers prowl for stories, engaging in unconventional PR stunts like Winky D’s extra-terrestrial gear to attract attention to your product and getting personal with customers.

The traction pattern will determine what works best for the particular stage, all strategies feeding into the establishment of the business into a web-wide phenomenon.

Each of the traction channels is meticulously explained with insider interludes in form of interviews and anecdotes from the eminent meddlers of Silicon Valley. The channels are prefaced with methods of determining what works, foregrounding it and knowing when to replace it.

“Traction” neither riffs on motivational aphorisms nor wades into ideological war zones. Rather it offers a minimalist, practical guide to start-up success.

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