The NextView podcast Traction shares the incredible stories of the creative and unusual things entrepreneurs did to make initial progress in an important area of their businesses. You can listen on iTunes. Stories to date include LinkedIn, General Assembly, NatureBox, InsightSquared, and more.

It’s always amazing to hear people’s founding stories, but few have struck me as more necessary for entrepreneurs to hear today than this one. Everybody is hot to publish content and build their audience, whether for the company or their own personal brands. But few actually understand the tactics to get there. It’s not pretty, it’s not about going viral, and it’s sure as hell not always a nice, repeatable process.

In this episode of Traction, Kathryn Minshew, co-founder and CEO of career platform The Muse, shares the story of all the scrappy things she did — things that “didn’t scale” — to drive meaningful traffic and generally build a career platform that companies like Uber, Facebook, and Adidas turn to for their hiring needs. Four million individuals also turn to the site for their career needs, and Kathryn was generous in sharing both her story and her tactics for starting that process.

Also in this episode are related tips and tactics for generating traffic as a startup — things you can plug directly into your business to help make early progress.

Listen right here:

 

– Inside the Episode –

Startup Lessons You’ll Learn:

  • Tactics to build audience for a startup
  • What the very FIRST step to building an audience of millions should be
  • Clever uses of channels blogging, email, social, and more

 Great Stories You’ll Hear:

  • Kathryn’s fight for early traffic through some very non-scalable means
  • How the first promotion discussion of her career led to an uncomfortable moment and, in a positive twist, some national press for The Muse

Links Mentioned: 

 Community Contributions From:

To get all episodes of Traction as soon as they’re live, plus exclusive resources and advice for seed-stage startups, subscribe to the View From Seed or follow @NextViewVC.