41 growth tips

Takeaways for the month of August

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:

1. How Builder.io got early traction

2. How API platform Violet.io got early traction by focusing on user pain

3. How Journey got their first 100 users

4. How Sunsama got early traction

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The following is an easily-digestible recap of lessons learned from our featured founders this month:

1. Empathize with the user’s problems

2. It’s okay to start over and rebuild the product

3. Learn how to sell early on

4. Sell to companies within network via referrals

5. Offer free work by having the customer pay for only the software fee and you do the implementation, etc.

6. Talk to enterprise customers can give you validation

7. If users are still using your crappy MVP, you might be onto something

8. If you make a perfect product or if requires a perfect product to get traction, you might not be solving a big enough problem

9. Talk to your users and customers

10. Rapid test on customers

11. You need people to tell you about their experience with the product

12. Remove the assumption that you really know anything

13. Data is vitally important

14. Experiment or die

15. Don’t think creating a grand master plan will ever work

16. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come

17. Assuming what should work is the big problem

18. Immediately double down on what’s working

19. Think about investing in GitHub and open source

20. Figma plugins can work really well

21. Partnerships can work for longer term success

22. Prioritize your bets

23. Every action you take has a probability of getting lucky

24. Don’t underestimate how important marketing is

25. Get on Twitter sooner

26. Be customer-focused and customer-obsessed

27. As an early stage founder, you need to define exactly what traction means for your business

28. You want to focus on finding product-market fit by clarifying how you solve pain 

29. Map out the pain of your buyers experience in different stages of your space

30. If the pain is a 10 out of 10 for the user, you immediately have signal you're going in the right direction

31. If you’re in B2B, get your first users from investor or influencer intros

32. Founders underestimate their own feedback

33. Recruit your friends to become early users

34. Consider product-led growth

35. Consider using a waitlist

36. Have a hypothesis about why users aren’t using the product and then just build stuff and see if the metrics improve

37. Figure out a way to build an onboarding experience that is self-service

38. Try leaning into organic growth—just people using it and telling their colleagues and other people about it

39. Success can come by focusing on activating customers

40. Look for anti-patterns to help steer your roadmap

41. You just have to try a lot of stuff

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