Traction in a Startup — What it is and what it isn’t.
I wanted to write this piece for all the people out there that have created a side hustle, or taken the big leap and started a business from the ground up.
My experience is something similar and I have been able to see two startups side by side, one that has traction and one that has limited traction.
Define Traction
Well, to me traction is where people are talking about your service or product and it is gathering momentum in terms of sales.
Whether that translates into bottom-line profits is a different matter and depends upon the business, but you would hope so.
Traction — What it is and isn’t
You might hear the phrase momentum, traction or something similar. What it is not for me:
- Paying to create that traction and force actions
- Raising a shed load of cash to gain attention
- Spending a fortune on advertising to not see a return
It’s a bit hypocritical, because, running ads can be used for marketing and marketing is what you need to aid traction, but for me, you can run all the ads in the world and get people to your site. But, if you don’t leave them with a good impression, it will fade.
You may see a good number of people coming to the website, but you won’t see meaningful actions or questions coming from it.
What traction is for me:
- Getting good organic views
- Having meaningful interactions
- People leaving reviews about the product or service
- Talking about your product or service
What Does it Look Like?
That’s the beauty, it looks different for each and every start-up but is likely to have some common threads.
Most of the time, you need the early believers in order to take a leap of faith in your product or service and then as more and more of those come along, that should lead to more and more people finding you.
This part for me is mainly organic and is supplemented by marketing, not just FB ads, but various types of marketing.
I found that when I ran ads (Google and FB) on both accounts one was having more meaningful interactions and the other was just bouncing. This tells me there is a problem in the first instance.
We all see the stories where they go from 0–100mph in 2 hours and they did all following this process that they teach for free (but isn’t actually free).
I personally don’t see this as sustainable because the foundations of most companies are it’s processes and how it deals with customers. It can’t iterate this if the growth is so quick.
How To Get That Elusive Traction You Need
Well, it’s not simple as just doing xyz.
There are many things to think about and from my experience have found these actions allowed me to gain a bit more traction to move to the next stage:
- Content (blogs and social media)
- Networking
- Working on SEO
- Testing ads on small budgets
- Reviews
- Partnerships
- Good processes
- The product and service
There might be many reasons as to why the traction isn’t there. As I say, I have one with and one without traction and finding the reason can be tricky and a process of elimination.
However, the more possibilities you can eliminate the closer you get to finding the root problem.
I hope this has helped, it has mainly built up through ramblings and thoughts in my head.
