Traction Conf 2018
as the organisers put it
Traction is a community of +110k innovators, bringing leaders behind the fastest-growing companies to share business advice via webinars, podcasts, meetups, retreats, and conferences.
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Highlights | 03m | |
Advice centers on product-market fit: prioritize the problem over the solution, watch actions not words, and ship early because done beats perfect. A user data… | ||
| Rebuilding Reddit: A Case Study | Chris Slowe | 20m |
Reddit undergoes a front-to-back rebuild: mobile apps launched in 2016 and the web is rewritten with TypeScript + React rewrite, creating a single-page shell… | ||
| How to Find & Train World-Class Engineers Overseas | Christina Sass | 12m |
Andela trains and vets overseas engineers, builds discipline for distributed work and places them with startups and enterprises. Claims: hire and grow instead… | ||
| Lessons Learned from Growing & Scaling Businesses from $1M to $500M in ARR | Karen Peacock | 20m |
Claims that real‑time, messaging‑first engagement dramatically lifts conversion with 82% higher conversion rates are supported by customer data and case… | ||
| Castles in the Cloud | Jerry Chen | 16m |
Cloud giants win on billions in capex, Metcalfe-style network effects, and owning the top-of-funnel, so six practical anti-cloud strategies emerge: system of… | ||
| Preserving Conversion Rates While Scaling Demand | Jim Szafranski | 17m |
Prezi keeps demand scaling from viral growth—400 million presentations in a crawlable library drawing about a billion visitors a year—while reversing falling… | ||
| How to Build & Scale a $3.5 Billion Rocketship | Dave Pickles | 20m |
Platform processes about 9 million opportunities per second to pick where to place an ad, built a buyer-only, data-driven RTB stack starting in 2009, spends… | ||
| From $0 to IPO at Breakneck Speed | Sameer Dholakia | 22m |
SendGrid scales to IPO while hitting $100M+ revenue and 75,000 paying customers, anchoring decisions in four core values called the four H's (happy, hungry… | ||
| Using AI to Scale Product Growth | Jeetu Patel | 21m |
Box describes concrete work: built Box Skills to run third‑party image/audio/video models over tens of thousands to millions of files for automatic tagging… | ||
| How to Scale While Staying True to Your Mission and Values | Max Lytvyn | 18m |
Grammarly claims it scales by turning an explicit mission — improving lives by improving communication — and a short, mandatory set of five core values… | ||
| How to Build for Efficiency While Still Maintaining a Local Lens | Sarah Jones Simmer | 22m |
Bumble launches in 2014 with a clear claim: create a safer dating marketplace by letting women make the first move, then reuse that trust to build Bumble BFF… | ||
| Startup Lessons from TaskRabbit | Leah Busque Soliva | 25m |
Builds a neighborhood labor marketplace that launches in Boston (2008), scales to 40+ cities, and exits to Ikea after proving demand; begins as an… | ||
| Stop Selling, Start Serving | Robson Grieve | 16m |
Argues for swapping paid acquisition for relentless customer help: turn solved support tickets and docs into public content, use Jobs-to-Be-Done to target real… | ||
| 5 Steps to Lifecycle Marketing Success | Menaka Shroff | 16m |
Claims that upsell and lifecycle work drive revenue growth, supported by concrete tactics: use multi-touch attribution instead of last-touch, run NPS scoring… | ||
| It's Now a Product-Led Growth World | Devon McDonald | 20m |
Argues that product-led growth cuts acquisition costs and shortens payback: Dropbox reports ~$1.1B revenue vs Box ~$500M, with Box historically spending ~80%… | ||
| The 3 Rules Behind the Most Successful Products | SC Moatti | 22m |
Three concrete rules: body: beauty = efficiency—design for zero friction using examples like Pandora’s Music Genome and Airbnb swapping a star for a heart and… | ||
| Setting Up Your Growth Team To Scale | David Mausolf | 22m |
Company scales growth by picking the right leader for the business model (marketplace vs social) and by building small autonomous pods with a data scientist… | ||
| 3 Market Forces Shaping How We Buy & Sell Things | Laura Behrens Wu | 16m |
Company Shippo powers shipping for 35,000 e-commerce stores and has shipped 70 million packages in four years, claiming shipping costs ate into margins as US… | ||
| Human Empathy as an Antidote to Automation | Tiffany Apczynski | 18m |
Zendesk explains how it operationalizes empathy through a CSR program that makes customer-facing teams volunteers: a Drexel study shows volunteering every… | ||
| The FreshBooks Growth Journey: A 10 Year Overnight Success | Mike McDerment | 19m |
Bootstrapped from a parents' basement with 10 customers paying $10/mo, FreshBooks grows by internet marketing, SEO, 400 blog posts and publicity stunts that… | ||
| How to Build & Scale a Marketplace from $0 to Billions | Matt Mickiewicz | 19m |
Claims fast validation without heavy engineering by using Typeform SurveyMonkey and Google Sheets and running manual matching with forms to prove supply then… | ||
| The Open Platform Ecosystem | Jason Warner | 22m |
GitHub states it stays an open platform after the pending Microsoft acquisition, pledges to work with Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and frames itself as the… | ||
| A Bootstrapper's Guide to $500 Million in Revenue | Sridhar Vembu | 30m |
Zoho boots revenue to the hundreds of millions while refusing outside capital, claiming no VC money and running 300,000 customers through an expanding suite… | ||
| CxO Summit | 01m | |
Traction Conf 2018's CxO Summit brought together over 170 tech Founders and C-Suite execs at Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain for a day of conversations, great… | ||
| nothing matches | ||