by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares
Traction is real customers. If you charge for your product, it's real paying customers. If your product is free, it's a real user base. Traction is a signal that your team can produce real results in a real market.
Getting traction is a signal to everyone (including yourself) that your business is less risky.
If you're starting a company, chances are you have the ability to build a product. Almost every failed startup has a product. What most failed startups don't have are enough customers.
We advocate exploring getting traction in parallel with product development. In fact, by rough estimate we think each of these activities should get about 50% attention.
Most startups don't fail at building a product. They fail at acquiring customers. The biggest mistakes I see over and over again when startups try to get traction are as follows (in order of importance). …
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