Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares lays out nineteen channels through which a startup can acquire customers, and argues that most founders never seriously test more than two or three of them. This series works through all nineteen, one group at a time, and asks a specific question for each channel. What does this look like when the customer is in Accra, Kumasi, or a mid-sized Ghanaian town rather than San Francisco or London?
This first post covers five channels built around earning or buying attention from an audience that does not yet know a business exists. Targeting blogs, publicity, unconventional PR, search engine marketing, and social and display ads all sit in this category. Each one transfers to Ghana with real adjustments, and each one depends on a specific piece of local infrastructure or behavior being in place before it will work.
Targeting Blogs Becomes Targeting Trusted Community Pages
In the original framework, targeting blogs means finding the specific niche publications a startup's ideal customer already reads and getting featured, sponsored, or guest posted on them. Mint used this channel to acquire its first forty thousand customers before it had spent a dollar on traditional advertising, largely by sponsoring mid-sized financial bloggers and offering early access badges that readers could embed on their own sites.
The direct equivalent of a niche blog is thinner on the ground in Ghana than in the United States, but the underlying behavior it depends on, a trusted voice that a specific audience already follows, is very much present. It usually shows up as a well-run Facebook group for school administrators, a WhatsApp broadcast list run by a respected trade association secretary, or a personal page belonging to someone with genuine standing in a specific professional community. The tactic transfers almost exactly. Identify the handful of these trusted voices your ideal customer already follows, offer them something genuinely useful to share, whether that is early access, a referral incentive, or simply a well-written piece of content worth forwarding, and let their existing trust do the work an ad would otherwise have to buy.
What has to be true for this to work is that a founder actually knows which of these informal, trusted community nodes exist for their specific niche. This takes real research, often just spending time inside the WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages a target customer already frequents, rather than assuming the audience gathers on a conventional blog the way it might elsewhere.
Publicity Still Runs Through a Media Chain, Just a Shorter One
The book's account of publicity describes a media ecosystem where stories filter upward, starting with smaller blogs and working toward larger outlets like The New York Times or CNN, because big media now scours smaller sites for material rather than waiting for direct pitches.
Ghana's media landscape works on a shorter version of the same chain. Outlets like GhanaWeb, MyJoyOnline, Citi FM, and a growing set of local business and tech publications actively look for stories about Ghanaian companies solving genuinely local problems, and they are considerably more accessible to a first-time founder than a major international outlet would be. A well-told, locally grounded story, framed around a specific Ghanaian problem rather than a generic global pitch, has a real chance of picking up coverage on these platforms, and that coverage carries weight with local investors, partners, and customers even when it never reaches an international audience.
What has to be true here is that the story is genuinely local and specific. Ghanaian journalists and editors are far more receptive to a pitch grounded in a concrete local statistic or a real customer story than to a repackaged version of a pitch built for a Silicon Valley audience.
Unconventional PR Needs a Story the Local Press Actually Wants to Tell
The book's favorite example of unconventional PR is Half.com's stunt of renaming an entire Oregon town for a year, a move that landed the company coverage on national television. The underlying principle is that a genuinely unusual, well-executed stunt can generate attention no amount of paid advertising could buy, precisely because so few companies attempt it.
A stunt on that scale is rarely realistic for an early-stage Ghanaian startup, but smaller, culturally grounded versions of the same idea work well locally. Partnering with a well-known local personality for a genuinely useful public demonstration, tying a launch to an existing cultural moment like a market day or a festival, or creating something shareable and specifically Ghanaian in its humor or framing can generate the same disproportionate attention at a fraction of the cost. The principle from the book still holds even at a smaller scale: almost nobody in a given local industry is doing this, which is exactly why it works when done well.
What has to be true is restraint and genuine cultural fluency. A stunt that feels imported or tone deaf will be ignored or, worse, mocked, while one that plugs into something Ghanaian audiences already recognize and enjoy has real word of mouth potential.
Search Engine Marketing Works Best as a Landing Page Testing Tool First
The book frames SEM less as a pure acquisition channel and more as a fast, cheap way to test which version of a product idea customers actually respond to, citing Archives.com's practice of running several different landing pages under different Google ad campaigns before building anything, simply to see which framing generated the most signups.
This use case transfers to Ghana more cleanly than SEM as a pure scaling channel does. Search volume for many local, specific terms is still relatively thin compared to more mature markets, which means paid search alone rarely delivers the sheer volume that made it a core channel for a company like Archives.com. But the testing discipline behind it is extremely valuable regardless of scale. A founder can build two or three simple landing pages describing different versions of an offer, run a small Google Ads budget behind each, and use mobile money confirmation or a WhatsApp click through as the conversion event instead of a full checkout flow, since that better reflects how Ghanaian customers actually complete transactions online.
What has to be true is that a founder treats SEM primarily as a research tool at this stage of the market rather than assuming it can scale the way it does for a company selling to a much larger, higher intent search audience.
Social and Display Ads Fit Ghana's Attention Patterns More Naturally Than Search Does
The book distinguishes between direct response advertising, aimed at an immediate sale, and indirect response advertising, aimed at building familiarity with an audience that is not yet ready to buy. Social ads, it argues, tend to work best in this second, awareness building mode.
This distinction matters even more in Ghana than the original context suggests. Facebook and Instagram usage is high across a wide range of income levels, and a large share of daily online attention runs through these platforms rather than through search. This makes social ads a genuinely strong channel for the early, awareness building stage of the customer journey. Display advertising, by contrast, is considerably weaker locally, since the dense network of blogs, niche sites, and content publishers that display ad networks depend on in more mature markets is much thinner in Ghana.
What has to be true is patience with the indirect response model. A founder running social ads in Ghana should expect to build familiarity over several touches before a purchase happens, particularly for anything that requires real trust, rather than judging the channel purely on immediate click through and conversion numbers.
A Short Summary Worth Remembering
Five channels, five local substitutions worth holding onto. Targeting blogs becomes targeting the trusted Facebook groups and WhatsApp lists a specific niche already follows. Publicity runs through a shorter, more locally accessible media chain that rewards genuinely local stories. Unconventional PR needs cultural fluency more than budget. Search engine marketing earns its keep as a cheap testing tool before it earns its keep as a scaling channel. And social ads carry more early weight in Ghana than display or search, because that is where daily attention already lives.
The next post in this series moves from channels built around earning attention to channels built around owned, organic growth: search engine optimization, content marketing, email marketing, viral marketing, and engineering as marketing.
