Hello, and welcome to the monthly recap issue of Traction. I’m Joshua, and each week I chat with an experienced founder about how they got early traction for their startup.
If you missed this month’s founder interviews, you can find them here:
The following is an easily-digestible recap of lessons learned from our featured founders this month:
Empathize with the user’s problems
It’s okay to start over and rebuild the product
Learn how to sell early on
Sell to companies within network via referrals
Offer free work by having the customer pay for only the software fee and you do the implementation, etc.
Talk to enterprise customers can give you validation
If users are still using your crappy MVP, you might be onto something
If you make a perfect product or if requires a perfect product to get traction, you might not be solving a big enough problem
Talk to your users and customers
Rapid test on customers
You need people to tell you about their experience with the product
Remove the assumption that you really know anything
Data is vitally important
Experiment or die
Don’t think creating a grand master plan will ever work
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
Assuming what should work is the big problem
Immediately double down on what’s working
Think about investing in GitHub and open source
Figma plugins can work really well
Partnerships can work for longer term success
Prioritize your bets
Every action you take has a probability of getting lucky
Don’t underestimate how important marketing is
Get on Twitter sooner
Be customer-focused and customer-obsessed
As an early stage founder, you need to define exactly what traction means for your business
You want to focus on finding product-market fit by clarifying how you solve painÂ
Map out the pain of your buyers experience in different stages of your space
If the pain is a 10 out of 10 for the user, you immediately have signal you're going in the right direction
If you’re in B2B, get your first users from investor or influencer intros
Founders underestimate their own feedback
Recruit your friends to become early users
Consider product-led growth
Consider using a waitlist
Have a hypothesis about why users aren’t using the product and then just build stuff and see if the metrics improve
Figure out a way to build an onboarding experience that is self-service
Try leaning into organic growth—just people using it and telling their colleagues and other people about it
Success can come by focusing on activating customers
Look for anti-patterns to help steer your roadmap
You just have to try a lot of stuff
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Thanks for reading! Check out the other interviews - hopefully they're helpful.