The Purple Cow: Building Customer Traction
Make something worth remarking about, and engineer in advance what you want people to say.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 92%
Godin combines Steve Blank's customer-traction test with his own Purple Cow concept: the best signal a startup has hope is whether engaged people stick around, come back, and tell their friends — and what they say. 'Remarkable' literally means worth making a remark about. If you make someone's life better when they talk about you, and you know in advance what you want them to say, they're more likely to say it — turning word of mouth into your growth engine.
Origin
Steve Blank (customer traction) combined with Seth Godin's own 'Purple Cow' / remarkability concept.
Core principles
- 01Customer traction = do they stick around, come back, and tell friends — and what do they say
- 02Remarkable means 'worth making a remark about,' not gimmicky or viral
- 03The person's life must get better when they talk about you
- 04Design the product so telling others raises the teller's status
- 05Word of mouth beats paid ads and sales teams for most products
How to run it
- 1
Test for stickiness and return
Check whether people who engage with you stick around and come back for more — the single best early signal of a startup's viability.
Pro tip Do this before scaling spend; traction is the leading indicator.
- 2
Test whether they tell friends — and what they say
Observe not just whether people refer you but the exact words they use. The remark itself is the growth mechanism.
Watch out A viral video is gimmickry, not remarkability — don't confuse buzz with traction.
- 3
Engineer the remark into the product
Build a product where talking about it makes the teller's own life or status better, and decide in advance what you want them to say so they're more likely to say it.
Pro tip Ask: does this work better for my users if they tell other people about it? If yes, your marketing problem is largely solved.
Watch out If it doesn't work better when shared, users have no reason to tell anyone, and no one will hear about you.
In the wild
Marissa Mayer insisted Google's homepage stay at two buttons while Yahoo had 183 links. The stripped-down design made an implicit promise ('we're smart enough to take you where you want without browsing') so remarkable that tech-forward users sent lost friends to Google, knowing they wouldn't come back for more help.
→ Word of mouth from a status-raising remark drove adoption; Godin credits Mayer with enormous market value.
Word beat WordPerfect because it was the format co-workers needed to interoperate on. Once you migrated, you didn't go back, and it was in each user's interest to insist others use Word.
→ The remark ('use Word') served the teller's own interest, spreading adoption.
Common mistakes
Chasing buzz instead of traction
IHOP's fake 'IHOb' rename and the Oreo Super Bowl tweet got buzz but no evidence of extra sales — buzz doesn't sell if you're not in the entertainment business.
Relying on ads or a platform to save you
Hoping Apple picks you or that paid ads carry you, without a shareable product, almost certainly fails.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early-stage founders deciding how to grow who lack big ad budgets and need word-of-mouth to work.
Not ideal for
Categories where purchase is driven by entertainment/buzz rather than utility, or B2B motions genuinely reliant on sales teams.
From the transcript
“the single best way to tell if a startup's got any hope whatsoever is do the people who engage with you stick around do they…”
“the word remarkable means worth making a remark about”
“if you make something where the person's life gets better if they talk about you and you know in advance what you want them to…”
From the episode
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more