God knows I have no clue how to do it!  To learn how to do it, i’ve been watching http://tractionbook.com/ to learn about it.  So far i’ve watched Garry Tan’s and Justin Kan’s interview.  I thought Justin’s interview was very insightful in regards to how they recognized that justin.tv’s initial idea, following around justin, would be short lived and that they needed to be able to transform their gimmick into something a bit more long lasting.  this realization eventually transformed into the current business model of justin.tv, live broadcasting.  They gained traction by leveraging their initial idea (which was very innovative) and the publicity they received into a real business model (at least that’s what i took from it).

Garry on the other hand believed that their traction was primarily driven by its ease of use.  Since posterous was so easy to use, people created blogs via email (no password).  this allowed the site to grow virally, and very fast.  user’s would create accounts then pass their posterous site links to other users via facebook/twitter.  then the viewers of the blog would want their own blog, and would create their blog on posterous since it was so easy to create.

I thought Garry’s experience was a little more helpful to me than Justin’s.   It seems Justin was able to leverage a novel idea into something more powerful.  While that’s a great experience, i’m not sure how helpful it is to me since my idea isn’t a ‘novel’ idea.  Garry’s experience was a bit more practical – lower customer acquisition barriers as much as possible.  Get them signed on and using fast – (sorta like a drug dealer… the first one’s free).  Once the user is on the system, figure out a way to make the user a evangelist indirectly.  Make them promote your site through the user’s own goals.