Exceptional

Justin Mears was 25 years old when he joined Exceptional in 2012 as director of revenue. The SaaS company was already showing promise, generating around $700K in annual revenue, but needed help scaling the revenue-generating side of the business. Mears saw an opportunity to build a sales team and run marketing for a product gaining real traction.

Mears and his co-author Gabriel Weinberg began writing the Traction book before he joined Exceptional, but paused during his intensive work scaling the company. After Exceptional's $12 million acquisition by Rackspace in 2013—where the company had grown to $1.9M ARR—Mears had more breathing room. He stayed at Rackspace for about a year and used that time to push the book through production, inspired by a simple question: "How do you get traction?" He found most marketing books lacking and set out to answer this question comprehensively.

Mears and Weinberg spent a year and a half building an email list before launch. Their strategy was methodical: they created a landing page at tractionbook.com featuring the faces of people they'd interviewed, and built a Twitter bot nine months before launch that followed people who followed "The Lean Startup." This bot alone generated 10-30 email signups per day. When they launched, their 5,000-person email list had exceptional engagement—60-70% open rates, more than double industry standard.

The self-published book sold 38,000 copies, far exceeding expectations. Podcasts became their most effective marketing channel, followed by the email list strategy. However, being self-published meant they couldn't hit the New York Times bestseller list, despite strong sales. When their growth began to tail off, rather than reinvest in relaunching, they decided to pursue a publisher deal when Tim Ferriss's book agent Steve Hanselman reached out. Portfolio Random House offered a six-figure advance (north of $100,000), with 15% of hardcover sales and 25% of digital sales after earning out the advance through 25,000-30,000 copies sold.

The book relaunched October 6th with a new strategy: hitting the New York Times bestseller list. They're deploying lessons learned from the first launch—podcasts as their strongest channel—while adding new tactics like a free seven-day email course with actionable traction strategies. Mears runs a growth meetup in San Francisco and continues as a founder, having previously founded two other startups (one acquired, one unsuccessful). At 25, he's positioned the book for greater distribution through traditional bookstores and airports, giving it, as he says, "a second life."