Traction (Penguin Books)

In Traction, successful entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares offer a comprehensive overview of the various ways startups can achieve strong, sustainable growth, and a guide to choosing the ones that will make the difference to your business.

Why do so many startups fail? According to entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, most failed startups make the fatal mistake of putting all their effort into perfecting their product at the cost of reaching out to potential users.

Instead, they should be putting half their resources into getting traction. Traction is the essential guide for any startup looking to stay ahead of the curve and start building a user base early in the game.

The book offers no one-size-fits-all solution: every startup is unique, so no single method is guaranteed to generate traction. Instead, the authors identify nineteen different traction channels, from viral marketing to trade shows.

They offer insights on how to exploit each one to its fullest potential, and provide a framework to test various channels and identify the best one for any startup.Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine that doesn't track searches and emphasizes their users' privacy.

It received over 1 billion searches in 2013 and is growing rapidly. Justin Mares is the founder of two startups and former Director of Revenue at Exceptional, a software company that was acquired by Rackspace in 2013.