Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

As testing is central to getting traction, you should seek online tools to help you organize and execute your tests, even if they are offline tests. Sean Ellis, growth adviser to Dropbox and Eventbrite, had this to say about this approach: The faster you run high-quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. D

even if it is just guesstimating at first. As we mentioned earlier, you should be thinking about only those traction channels and specific strategies that have a chance of moving the needle for your

Making A/B testing a habit (even if you run just one test a week) will improve your efficiency in a traction channel by two or three times.

An untapped channel strategy may mean trying something different in an established venue, but it also could mean trying a venue no one else is using. For example, you might be able to take advantage of new marketing platforms while they are still in their infancy. Zynga (the maker of FarmVille and other games) did this with Facebook, dominating its

Inner ring tests are designed to do two things. First, to optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be. Second, to uncover better channel strategies within this traction channel.

For example, the questions below seem like they are difficult or might require a lot of research to answer: How many prospective customers landed on my Web site? What are the demographics of my best and worst customers? Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay customers longer? However, they

How much does it cost to acquire each customer through this channel strategy? How many customers are available through this channel strategy? Are the customers you are getting through this channel the ones you want right now?

The goal of middle ring tests is to find a promising channel strategy to focus on. A channel strategy is a particular way to acquire customers within a channel.

In its most basic form, A/B testing is a science experiment with a control group (A) and an experimental group (B). A/B testing is often called split testing because for the best results you split people randomly into one of the two groups, and then measure what they do.