Speaker 1: One of the most useful books I have read in my history as an entrepreneur is Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. He's the CEO of DuckDuckGo. The thesis is that there are only 19 marketing channels. Done. Period. And I actually agree. There are only 19 marketing channels. Any growth hack, any tactic that you've seen can be classified into one of those. And it's useful to know them all, because the art and the science that is growing a business consists in essentially testing as many campaigns in as many channels as fast as possible. And of course, measuring the results accurately. So to this day, this is pretty much how we operate in our company. We spend a few hundred dollars, sometimes a few thousand dollars in an experiment, wait results. If we've got customers for our sweet spot, customer acquisition costs, we double down. If we didn't, we moved to a different channel. This YouTube channel is exactly that. And we are still on the doubling down phase of the growth. All startups are focusing on the same channels. So Gabriel's book sort of forces you into thinking outside of these traditional channels. And that's why I think it's tremendously valuable that you memorize, familiarize, keep a cheat sheet of this list. Anyway, I'm going to go over all the channels that this book lists, along with an example for each one of these campaigns in 30 seconds or less. So first we have viral marketing. Viral marketing happens when it can convince users to convert other customers with a positive virality coefficient. The R0 number, which I'm sure we're all familiar with by now, estimates how many new customers can an existing customer convert. And if that number is higher than one, you have virality. Now, if you believe that your growth engine is virality, then your product should focus on that virality. That's the example of Wordle, recently acquired by the New York Times. You sort of want to share how smart you are because you solved today's puzzle. And this silly, simple emoji board was perfect for virality. It is, of course, easier said than done. It requires a master understanding of user experience and a good understanding of gamification. Happy to make a video about gamification if you're interested. Second is PR. And that's, of course, public relations. Whether you or your PR agency takes care of it, it involves creating relationships with reporters and creating stories that they are bound to share. Probably the most important example today is Tesla, which does practically zero marketing, but everybody talks about it. Whether it's the new car release, the self-driving tech, or sending a car to space, or even Elon Musk's randomness. People love to read about Tesla, and the press loves to write about it. By the way, my experience with PR is mixed. It's hard to measure, and you can't control it when you get featured. But I've seen startups that make it just relying primarily on this. And it seems to work. Number three is unconventional PR. Technically, sending a car to space classifies as unconventional PR. In other words, this is a stunt that gets everybody talking about this. For example, this company called Airtime invited Martha Stewart, Jim Carrey, Jimmy Fallon, and Olivia Munn to their launch. Viral videos are also stunts. Remember, will it blend? They actually sell those blenders, and it's just genius marketing. It's risky, but if you can make it work, it's effective. Next up, we have Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is essentially paying Google for that ad that shows up responding to searches. Search ads are incredible because of the moment of intent. If people are searching for a pitch deck creation service, you can very well bet that they're an entrepreneur looking to create a pitch deck. So, the decision is made. It's not nurturing, it's not brand awareness, it's simply converting a customer who already made a purchasing decision and now is just looking for where to execute it. This is why search ads are often expensive. But if you can get the economics working, you essentially unlock a super-efficient and scalable growth channel. Next up is Display Ads. Those are your Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok ads. People aren't looking for what you offer. Instead, you're targeting them by their interests. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time here because you already know how this works. For us, they've worked well as retargeting. We server them to people who have visited our ads, watched one of our videos, and yet you're going to start seeing them right now. By the way, I believe that influencer marketing, or paid influencer marketing, falls in this category. While I think that Instagram influencers have stained the term a bit, there is value in someone you know, someone you follow, endorsing a product. And that is the case of Textmagic. I actually used their platform years ago while I was working for another company. It was a cool coincidence when they reached out to me because Prit, their CEO, watches our channel. So, Textmagic is an SMS service for businesses, and the reason why I thought it was relevant to talk about them in this video is precisely that they have a marketing and outreach channel that falls outside of the norm. While their tool supports the regular SMS features we're used to, like two-way communication, their big focus is marketing. Textmagic allows you to send SMS campaigns from their online platform, but also from an email, or from Zapier, or from a direct API integration. You can sort your contacts into different mailing lists to target them with specific campaigns, just with the personalization you would expect from an email marketing tool. Which brings me to email marketing. It's almost like a given these days, again, but there is still room to innovate. Look at what companies like Morning Brew or The Hustle are doing. They've been able to create incredible communities just by sending curated emails. People's emails are cluttered, and you're competing with hundreds of other messages. It's not easy. It's an overused outreach method these days, but you can absolutely make it work for your company if you focus on providing value with the content, or if you use an alternative delivery method like SMS. So, yeah, SMS, I think, classifies here, but has some added benefits. Even today, 95% of texts are read within three minutes of being sent. They're also significantly cheaper than emails. Next, I'm going to talk about offline ads. Because we, startup people, don't think about offline ads too much. If they're still effective, those are your TV, your subway, or your billboard ads. Gabriel Weinberg, the author of this book, had this super successful campaign by placing billboard ads on the highway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. So, if you're in tech, and especially if you're a Google employee, you drive that highway often, every day, maybe. So, his ad on DuckDuckGo brought a massive wave of new adopters, and even got the press talking about it, which makes it a bit of unconventional PR. My friend Pete from Jackpocket advertises on the New York subway, and they've found a way to track those conversions to measure the success and the ROI of this campaign, just like with any digital campaign. So, they rinse and repeat. Next up is SEO, that's Search Engine Optimization, the art and science of ranking in Google. For us, it essentially made our company. We would not be here if it wasn't for SEO. But, depending on your industry, it may not be an option. One of my favorite examples here is Zapier, a tool we use and love. They've essentially created articles and guides for any platform connection you can think of. So, if you search for that, Zapier is the first to pop up. And that's the service they provide. Number 9 is Content Marketing, and that's like preaching to the choir. If you're here, you know what content marketing is. I also made a full video about why you shouldn't do content marketing. 10 is Engineering as Marketing, and this is one of my favorites. When I was in the process of buying a house, I often needed a quick mortgage breakdown, and here's this little simple tool, and a bank gave it to me for free to do my estimate. No email is required, even. It's just a simple tool to bring brand awareness and probably to put me in a retargeting campaign. Another great example is Adobe. So many of their tools are free. They have this incredible app that scans your drawings or detects your handwriting, and it's free because that's a marketing campaign. It's Engineering as Marketing. Number 11 is Guest Posting or Targeting Blogs. These can go a long way. You can get credibility. You can publish valuable content, which is content marketing, and then add backlinks, which helps SEO. Number 12 is Business Development, essentially creating relationships with people so that they recommend you and your company to their peers, or so that you become a partner of theirs. Number 13 is Sales. And that is just sales. Capture a lead, outbound, inbound, cold email, and convert. Number 14 is Affiliate Programs. That consists in recruiting evangelists for your product and having them promoted for you, in exchange for a commission. If bringing a customer costs $50 using ads, why not pay someone that money for them to take care of that conversion? Number 15 is Leveraging Existing Platforms. That consists of building things on top of existing distribution networks. That's selling on Amazon versus running your own website, or leveraging the App Store to get discovered. I interviewed the CEO of this amazing tennis tracking platform. They're probably the best example I can think of of leveraging Apple's platform, showing up at Apple's events. This episode will air in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned for that. Number 16 is Trade Shows. Plenty of companies spend all their growth budget on a booth because the value, the relationships, and the customers they bring makes up for it. I went to Sasser last year and sat down with two founders who paid $50-$100K for their booths, and we made a whole video about how they justify that cost. Offline events consist of growing by engaging with people in the real world. The meetup scene in cities like New York is insane, and what better brand awareness than shaking someone's hand or having a beer with them? We've started doing meetups in New York recently. Number 18 is Speaking Engagements. You can find companies that rely completely on webinars to grow. Webinars are great to capture leads, to show how knowledgeable you are, and to expose yourself to someone's network. And then, last but not least, 19 is Community Building, which brings in a lot of tools from the other channels. Talking to your customers, meeting with them, sending them free swag, getting them to speak about you, which is virality, creating events for them, offline speaking events and engagements, staying in touch via email or via SMS marketing. And that's it. There are no more marketing channels in the world. Remember, don't ignore a channel because it sounds old-fashioned. Test it, always test it, and then decide. Hope this was useful. We'll see you next week.