Traction is a buzzword.

Week 18: What we’ve been up to this past few weeks

The last two weeks I’ve been locked into product development because it’s crunch time. Every couple of days I get on a call with my CTO to review the product and functionality, page by page, making sure everything’s where it needs to be. User experience is one of the key things attributed to the success of a product, especially in the early stages when you’re a random new website people are just discovering. And customer retention, well, that’s of utmost importance, because you want them to keep coming back time after time.

I say crunch time because next week we start demos. And the product needs to be fully troubleshooted before we can build the demo, so we can accurately walk partners through what our product will look like ahead of launch.

We’d been going back and forth on whether it was the right call to:

a) launch without official partners and scrape the data to show the functionality without actually generating revenue

or

b) onboard official partners pre-launch, so the moment we’re live, we’re immediately revenue-generating

After a few conversations, we landed on option B. We’re launching before we raise the majority of our pre-seed, so from an investor’s POV, if we’re already revenue generating by the time we go to them, that plays in our favour.

The second top priority I’ve been focusing on is TRACTION.

Ok, this is honestly a buzzword in the pre-seed startup space. Traction means a multitude of things, but in short, it’s just how many leads and eyeballs you have on your product, and how many people are genuinely interested in it.

This can look like waitlist sign-ups, social platform audience or follower count, newsletter sign-ups, and then more obvious things like app downloads and active users once you’re actually live with your beta.

For our business, at this stage, that looks like fostering community and social credibility, and waitlist sign-ups are a clear indication of that.

Posting on socials is a surefire way to build momentum. As I’m building this business, I’ve always had the intention of being a forward-facing founder and using founder-led marketing as part of my GTM strategy — and the easiest way to start that is by growing organically on socials first. For the last few months, I’ve been posting about the industry I’m building in on my personal accounts, and that content, stacked with this Substack series (which has doubled as a way to share the BTS of my building process with you guys), has functioned as a bit of a teaser for what the product is going to be.

Next up is launching the company’s own socials, which is coming, but isn’t the focus of this post and isn’t something I’m sharing just yet (it’s coming though, so stay tuned).

Here’s how I think about the funnel underneath all of it. It starts with founder-led content (that’s me), posting consistently, building trust and visibility as the person behind the product. That audience then becomes the entry point for the next stage: hosting events in collaboration with other companies that share our ideal customer. Those partnerships then do double duty as they get us in front of the right audience, and they teach us more about who that audience actually is, what they care about, and how they relate to our product, which is invaluable when you’re still refining who you’re building for.

From there, the goal is simple: turn that room, into waitlist sign-ups. Easier said than done? Maybe. But, that’s the concrete, trackable outcome of every event and every piece of content. It isn’t just brand awareness, but an actual name on a list or someone interested in what you’re doing. And once the company’s own social channels go live, that same audience becomes followers of the business itself.

All this essentially means is that, by the time we launch, we’re not starting from zero. We’re activating an audience we’ve been quietly building the whole time.

And that number isn’t just for show. I’ll be walking into investor meetings with real traction, a waitlist that’s actually growing, a community that’s been along for the ride and a damn good shot at getting the $$$ we are looking for to scale the business.

So that’s pretty much what we’ve been up to these past few weeks. We’re inching closer and closer to the finish line (aka launch)… and then the race will begin again, when the product is live, being tested, and the next set of challenges need to be addressed.

A final note

Don't forget, there is no single right way to do this. I know founders who have just launched with no traction and then focused on building their customer base post-launch and others that have created a 250,000 person waitlist before they launch their product. From what I’ve gathered, your approach is super specific to your business and factors like whether you are raising or not, etc, etc etc. Ask for expert opinions and advice if you can, but ultimately make your decision based on what you think is right for your business. It’s the advice I’ve been given and the advice I’m passing along forward.

xx KP