Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares

Weinberg grew DuckDuckGo into a real Google competitor while interviewing forty-plus founders about how startups actually acquire users; Mares brought the operator's view from building and selling his own companies. Traction came out of the pattern in those interviews: successful startups treated channel selection as a testable decision, and almost half of the nineteen channels were ones founders admitted they'd never seriously considered.

Weinberg wrote Traction while running the ultimate traction experiment: DuckDuckGo, a search engine competing with Google on a privacy secret nobody else would bet on. With Justin Mares — a founder who'd built and sold his own companies — he interviewed forty-plus founders and found the uncomfortable pattern: winning channels were rarely the ones founders naturally preferred. The Bullseye Framework operationalized that finding, and the book quietly became the standard answer to the question every accelerator hears weekly: 'the product works — now how do we get users?'