
Why getting traction is so hard these days - janober
http://andrewchen.co/growth-is-getting-hard/
======
payne92
This article is a mess.

Traction (esp. on mobile) has been hard for a long, long time; it's absolutely
not a new problem in 2017. Why? The competition to get and keep user attention
is BRUTAL.

On one side, we've got large, entrenched players (FB, Google, etc.). And when
something catches their eye, they pull it into their platform (FB vs
Foursquare, FB vs Snap, Apple vs Instapaper, etc.). This puts a soft upper-
bound on certain kinds of mobile ideas.

On the other side, we've got an amazingly efficient ecosystem for anyone with
a $200 laptop, a free Wifi connection, and talent to build the next great app.
To the first order: hosting, tools, etc are all free -- there are effectively
no barriers to entry.

On the article's content, some of the charts are 5-10+yrs old, which is
forever in Internet terms. It also says, "Paying for acquisition is one of the
key channels still available" \-- for very large national or global
brands...maybe..? But if you are a startup or midsized mobile app company and
your plan is to pay for customers, you need a new plan.

~~~
coldtea
> _Traction (esp. on mobile) has been hard for a long, long time; it 's
> absolutely not a new problem in 2017. Why? The competition to get and keep
> user attention is BRUTAL._

That doesn't make the article "a mess", just because it doesn't delve into a
particular pain point of one aspect of what it discusses -- that's classic
"first HN comment" hyperbole.

The article offers a much broader view, and goes into discussing trends,
similar patterns in history, for several aspects way beyond "mobile traction".

Which is also why "some of the charts are 5 years old". Because the cycle the
article refers to is not some short-term trend, but an overall assessment of
where things were and are going.

~~~
payne92
..but a chart that is five years old and a fast-moving space like the
Internet: difficult to argue patterns, since the patterns may have changed
dramatically since the chart was made!

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mmanfrin
Full page 'give me your email' popover on firstload is a great way of losing
traction from me.

~~~
superasn
Yes, anytime I see that happen the website immediately loses all respect. I
guess the A/B split tests might tell you do it but it is still a pretty dick
thing to do.

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exelius
This is why I believe ad tech is a zero-sum game.

New channels (banner ads, social ads, online video ads, etc) appear ad old
ones dry (TV, radio, etc) up. But the spend doesn't -- an ad buyer has a
campaign budget of $X, and is looking to maximize the amount of lift they can
get for that budget.

~~~
carapace
"50% of your advertising budget is wasted, the problem is no one can tell you
which 50%."

I don't think that's changed?

~~~
exelius
It's changed a little bit -- 50% of your advertising budget is wasted, and you
can generally tell which 50% -- but past performance is now a poor indicator
of future returns. So you can tell what 50% was wasted, but it's harder to
tell what's going to work next time.

~~~
shostack
The question of which 50% gets even murkier the more data we have. For
example, cross-channel/cross-device attribution used to be a known thing, but
it was always pretty hazy because pretty much all analytics and conversion
tracking was last click (or first touch if you're a direct mail company).

Then we started getting attribution tools and getting different pieces of the
puzzle. Now the issue has become that there's all these ways of looking at the
data that can point you in the right general direction, but short of
dynamic/data-driven attribution models with MASSIVE amounts of data feeding
into them, it can still be difficult to say "actually this is what this
channel did for us."

For orgs comfortable with data that is a bit fuzzier, that's fine, but for
orgs where people are held to strict numbers based on the last click, it can
hobble them when it comes to higher-funnel or view-through heavy channels like
social, display, PR, etc.

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krrishd
#6 Competing with boredom is easier than competing with Facebook + Google

^ this one stood out as a particularly strong point -- there's a finite amount
of time people have to burn on apps for non-utilitarian purposes, and social
networks have been pretty effective at eating that all up.

To me it suggests that consumer applications no longer can afford to merely be
fun or entertaining (unless they're good enough at that to compete with
Facebook, Snapchat, etc for more than a week of usage). The focus really has
to be on utility and solving pain-points that go beyond disrupting boredom
and/or "connecting people" in what have become conventional formats.

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simonswords82
At the end of the article it says: PS. Get new updates/analysis on tech and
startups

Why on earth would I sign up to a regular update from a person who simply
lists all the ways in which it is hard to get traction? It's absolutely the
case that you need to be clever to market a business and can't just throw shit
at a wall. I welcome that, because it increases the barrier to entry.

This means that those who get it right can generate some serious
revenue/profits and ultimately a sustainable business.

------
hieu
Relevant previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12044872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12044872)

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jes5199
I agree that web and mobile both seem to have gotten kind of stagnant. Is
there a next big platform on the horizon? (I worry that there isn't)

~~~
angryasian
AR / VR ?

~~~
gozur88
Yes. There's a heck of a lot you could do with AR nobody's done yet.

On the other hand, if you get into that business now you're in direct
competition with the likes of Google and Apple.

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TekMol
Me clicks on the link.

Me get's greeted with a giant fullscreen email grabbing popup.

Me thinks: Ok, I know why this guy has problems getting traction.

Don't bug people to follow you. Instead, make something people want.

~~~
abakker
And sell it, right? I mean, at some point you need the money. Either 1\. you
get it from the ads, and the people get bugged up front, or 2\. you just have
a paywall and sell it or, 3\. you are contributing content to the internet and
not looking for monetary compensation.

~~~
gergoerdi
We need much more of #3 than what we have. In relative terms, it seems #3 is
shrinking on the Internet over the decades.

------
carapace
I've had the solution to this for like twenty years. I don't have the time or
inclination to do it.

Automate MLM (Multi-Level Marketing), six or more levels deep.

"Affiliate Program" six or more levels (degrees of separation) to make a word-
of-mouth network that rewards people for making connections between sellers
and customers. Public all the data. Self-reinforcing, self-stabilizing.

I have no idea why no one has done this before. To me it is blindingly
obvious.

You could start tomorrow and eat Amazon's lunch within the year. Do it right
and nothing could stop you, no one could even begin to compete thanks to
Metcalfe's law. (In other words, if someone _could_ do a better job than you
the correct thing to do would be to quit and join their network. In other
words, there is a strange attractor that results in automatic partition
healing.)

Blah blah blah yadda yadda _waves hands_

I'll leave the details as the proverbial "exercise for the reader".

~~~
hello_newman
could you care to elaborate a bit more on that? if you don't feel like
discussing here, my contact info is on my profile.

~~~
carapace
email sent.

You can see for yourself one of the reasons why I don't try to pursue it:
skeptics. Thank you for having an open mind dude! ;-)

