# Traction — Full LLM Reference > The complete product reference for AI crawlers and LLM ingestion. Companion to llms.txt with deeper context, the full Bullseye Framework, the product's actual feature set, pricing, and how the auto-submit pipeline works under the hood. ## What Traction is Traction is a SaaS platform that operationalizes the Bullseye Framework from the book "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo founder) and Justin Mares. The Bullseye Framework is a systematic way to find your "one working channel" — the marketing channel that, when invested in deliberately, becomes the dominant source of customer acquisition for your business. The framework identifies 19 distinct marketing channels and uses a structured 3-ring testing process to identify which channel is the right bet for your specific business at your specific stage. Where the book gives you the framework, Traction gives you the tooling: an interactive Bullseye board, 750+ actionable tactics organized by channel, a directory submission engine that handles 35+ directories end-to-end, an experiment log to track what works, and AI-powered channel research that tells you which channels real businesses in your niche have used to grow. ## The 19 Traction Channels The Bullseye Framework defines 19 marketing channels every business can theoretically use. The job of the founder is to identify which 1-3 are the right bet for their stage and ICP, test them rigorously, and double down on the one that produces breakout results. 1. **Search Engine Marketing (SEM)** — Paid search ads on Google, Microsoft, and similar engines. Best when you have clear buyer intent keywords and unit economics that support paid acquisition. 2. **Search Engine Optimization (SEO)** — Organic search traffic. Long-tail keyword landing pages, topical clusters, AI-citation optimization (llms.txt, ChatGPT/Perplexity discoverability), backlink building. Compounds over 6-18 months. 3. **Content Marketing** — Long-form articles, customer stories, original research, comparison pages, tutorial content. Feeds SEO + builds authority. 4. **Email Marketing** — Onboarding sequences, behavioral triggers, re-engagement campaigns, founder plain-text emails, NPS-to-testimonial pipelines. 5. **Viral Marketing** — Two-sided referral programs, watermarked free tier outputs, shareable result cards, public leaderboards, viral free tools. 6. **Engineering as Marketing** — Build free tools, open-source components, Chrome extensions, Slack/Discord bots, public APIs, embeddable widgets, public benchmarks. Engineering effort that pays back as distribution. 7. **Targeting Blogs** — Backlink-gap analysis, skyscraper outreach, broken-link building, guest posts on niche blogs, sponsored newsletter placements, syndication to Hacker Noon / dev.to / Medium. 8. **Business Development** — Integration partnerships, co-marketing webinars, white-label deals, cloud marketplace listings (AWS / GCP / Azure), partner conferences, embed badge programs. 9. **Sales** — Cold outreach, async Loom demos, founder-led sales, prospect research docs, win/loss interviews, trial-to-paid playbooks. 10. **Affiliate Programs** — Rewardful / Tolt / FirstPromoter setup, top-customer recruitment, swipe copy, YouTuber and newsletter operator outreach, two-sided programs, second-tier referrals. 11. **Existing Platforms** — Distribute through Zapier Public Apps, Make.com, Stripe App Marketplace, Microsoft Teams App Store, Slack App Directory, IFTTT, Shopify App Store. Build on top of platforms with built-in audiences. 12. **Trade Shows** — Choose the right show (audience-fit beats flagship name), pre-show LinkedIn outreach, Wi-Fi sponsorship, side-events, speaking slots, QR-code lead capture, no-booth attendance. 13. **Offline Events** — Recurring meetups, sponsored meetups, paid workshops, founder dinner series, exec roundtables, coworking-space partnerships, customer appreciation events, masterminds, pop-up demo days. 14. **Speaking Engagements** — Podcast guest tours (20 in 60 days), speaker bureau pages, webinar pitching, conference CFP submissions, signature talks, Twitter Spaces office hours, paid workshops, AMAs. 15. **Community Building** — Owning your own Discord/Slack, promoting power users to moderators, joint events with adjacent communities, founder office hours. 16. **Social & Display Ads** — LinkedIn document and message ads, Meta lead ads, Reddit Promoted Posts, TikTok Spark Ads, YouTube TrueView, Threads/Bluesky early-market arbitrage, Pinterest and Quora ads. 17. **Offline Ads** — Transit ads in tech-hub cities, coffee-shop sponsorships, wallscape and mural ads, sticker bombing, reverse graffiti / pressure-washer stencils, trade magazine ads, creative direct mail, branded swag at conferences, airport ads, vehicle wraps, newspaper inserts. 18. **Public Relations** — HARO / Connectively / Featured.com pitches, press kit pages, data exclusives to tier-1 publications, news-cycle hijacks, Substack newsletter pitches, industry award applications, tech reporter outreach, Reddit AMAs, analyst briefings (Gartner / Forrester / IDC). 19. **Unconventional PR** — News-cycle hijacks, public bets with credible stakes, daily build-in-public journals, controversial industry books, annual transparency reports, crowdfunding campaigns as PR moments. ## How the Bullseye loop works The framework's loop has three phases mapped to three rings on a target: **Outer ring (brainstorm)**: List every plausible tactic for every channel. Don't filter yet. Just enumerate. Traction's tactic library (700+ entries) seeds this. **Middle ring (test)**: Pick the 2-3 most promising channels and run small, cheap, time-boxed tests. Each test asks: "Can this channel work for our business?" Not "did it scale today" but "is the signal there to justify investment". 90 days of tests typically clarifies which channel deserves the bet. **Inner ring (focus)**: One channel becomes the bullseye. Pour resources into it. Hire for it. Build dedicated tooling and content around it. The compounding effect of one focused channel beats spreading effort across three. The mistake most founders make: skipping the middle ring. They jump from "we should try SEO" directly to "we're spending $50K on SEO" without first running cheap tests that prove the signal exists. ## What's actually in the product ### The Bullseye Board (/app/board) An interactive UI with all 19 channels arranged as 3 concentric rings. Drag any channel into the outer (brainstorm), middle (testing), or inner (focus) ring. The board persists per project. Use it to plan your test cadence — typically 2-3 channels in the middle ring at any time. ### The Tactics Library (/app/tactics) 750+ actionable tactics organized by channel. Each tactic includes a title, multi-sentence description, 4-5 concrete steps, effort rating (low / medium / high), cost band ($0 to $500+), and time estimate. The library is searchable, filterable by channel + cost + effort, and built from real-world tactics that have worked for SaaS and indie businesses since 2020. The Submit tab inside Tactics also surfaces 550+ external places to submit your project: directories, communities, marketplaces, post-an-article platforms, crowdfunding sites, URL shorteners, and job boards. Each listing carries DR, traffic, link type (dofollow/nofollow), cost, and specialty tags so you can pick the right ones for your stage and niche. ### The Directory Submission Engine (/app/submit) Auto-submits your project to 60+ directories end-to-end. Built on Cloudflare Browser Rendering (a serverless Playwright runtime), it handles: - **Multi-step form filling** for directories with wizard-style flows - **CAPTCHA solving** (reCAPTCHA v2/v3, hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile) via 2Captcha integration - **Pool email verification** — each project gets a pool of disposable forwarding addresses, and a Cloudflare Email Worker handles inbox routing without exposing your personal email - **Magic-link consumption** — when a directory verifies via emailed link, the worker captures the URL, the pipeline navigates to it, and the session establishes - **OTP code extraction** — for directories that email a 6-digit code, the worker pulls it out and the pipeline enters it - **Single-phase inline auth** — for directories where the verification page is server session state (Supabase PKCE, OTP entry pages), the pipeline keeps one browser session alive through the whole register → verify → submit flow - **OAuth-only directories** — for directories that only accept Google/GitHub OAuth, a managed OAuth pool handles the auth (legacy infrastructure) The full architecture: Cloudflare Pages (frontend + API), Cloudflare Workers (queue consumer + email worker), Cloudflare Browser Rendering, Neon Postgres (state), 2Captcha (CAPTCHA solves), and Clerk (user auth). ### The Experiment Log (/app/experiments) Log every channel test you run. Each entry captures: hypothesis, channel, tactic, budget, time invested, outcome metric, learned. The log feeds the Bullseye Board so you can see at a glance which channels are still in test versus moved to focus or abandoned. ### Project DR Tracking For every project, Traction tracks Domain Rating (DR), backlink count, and referring domains weekly via Ahrefs. Founders get a Monday email digest showing the prior week's DR / link movements per project. Used to quantify the SEO bet — DR going up week-over-week means the SEO investment is compounding. ### AI Channel Research For each project, Traction runs OpenAI-powered research that surfaces: which channels businesses in your exact niche have used to grow, recent case studies, channel-specific tactics matched to your business stage, and a confidence-weighted ranking of the 19 channels for your specific context. ## Pricing Traction uses a lifetime-credit model — no subscriptions: - **Free tier**: Bullseye board, tactics library, 4 free auto-submit directories, 10 tactic preview, experiment log, settings, project summary - **$49** (1 credit): Unlocks all features for 1 project - **$99** (3 credits): 3 projects - **$299** (15 credits): 15 projects - **$350** (lifetime unlimited): Unlimited projects Credits are grandfathered at purchase rate forever. Existing customers never see price increases. ## Who Traction is for - **Indie hackers** running 1-3 SaaS products who want to systematically test channels instead of guessing - **Bootstrapped founders** who don't have a marketing team and need to do the work themselves - **SaaS agencies** managing multiple client projects — the multi-project pricing structure is built for this - **SEO consultants** who want the DR tracking + directory submission engine as part of their service stack - **Course / info-product creators** who want to find their distribution channel Not built for: enterprise sales motions, B2C consumer apps, or businesses already past $5M ARR. Those businesses have specialized growth teams who don't need a structured framework. ## Live tools (open + indexable) - [Free DR Checker](https://onlytraction.com/free-dr-checker): Free Ahrefs DR + traffic lookup with no signup required - [llms.txt](https://onlytraction.com/llms.txt): This file — published per llmstxt.org spec for AI-crawler discovery - [Sitemap](https://onlytraction.com/sitemap.xml): All public pages ## Contact + support Email: support@onlytraction.com Replies within 24 hours from the founder.