Title: (This is my old username, which I thought fit well with this post. You may know me now as yegg.)<p>I launched DuckDuckGo on HN (then Startup News) seven years ago: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=315142 and the idea of Traction book five years ago: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2098068. If I hadn&#x27;t gotten encouragement and excitement in these threads (which I did!) then I might have quit each shortly after. So thank you for that!<p>In 2009-2010, when I was struggling to get traction for DuckDuckGo, I started doing a series of interviews on my blog with successful founders about how they got traction in an effort to uncover a structured process for doing so. Naturally, I interviewed a lot of HN greats like patio11 (Patrick McKenzie), justin (Justin Kan), garry (Garry Tan), kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian) and other startup icons like Eric Ries, Jimmy Wales, etc. Last year I put a bunch of these early interviews on YouTube if you want to check them out: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;tractionbook<p>If I hadn&#x27;t been part of the HN community I probably wouldn&#x27;t have done these interviews or the series of blog posts that led to writing Traction, which in turn led to getting traction for DuckDuckGo.<p>A lot of people on HN have used DuckDuckGo and read the book and gave excellent feedback on both, a lot of which we have acted on to make these things what they are today today. The proximate cause for thinking about this was the second edition of the book came out yesterday, and I&#x27;m in a reflective mood.<p>I&#x27;m extremely grateful for being part of this community. Ask me anything, and I&#x27;ll try to help where I can.
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