We Have Traction! And We Don’t Care…

Arnaud Breton and I started VideoNot.es in March 2013 at a Google hackathon - as a pivot from UniShared - pitched it to a few silicon valley investors in June, stopped working on it in July and open-sourced it in September.

It seems like the usual story of the “Rise and Fall Of A Silicon Valley Startup”, maybe just a little bit faster. However, the traction that VideoNot.es generated when we launched it, and the traction that it’s still generating today — reaching 2 million pageviews a couple of weeks ago — spurred a debate with Franck Nouyrigat, a good friend and mentor of mine, co-founder of Startup Weekend, on why we were not taking advantage of this traction to get back to work on it.

These discussions made me realize a few things:

• Traction doesn’t beat passion. I was passionate about UniShared despite the fact that it has never gotten as much traction. I don’t have this passion for VideoNotes. I’m still unclear why, I just don’t.
• Traction doesn’t create a vision. Of course, we tried to build the vision to go with the traction (cf our pitch and business plan to silicon valley investors) but it was always too artificial / too far-fetched for me to be sufficiently confident in it.
• Entrepreneurs can be happy startupers. I’ll probably go back to entrepreneurship at one point — I’m just 26 after all — but I’ve discovered at Mention and, now at Curioos, that it can be as exciting to join founders to help them build a startup. As Jack Dorsey said, there is no founder, there are just “founding moments”.

So does this mean that traction doesn’t matter?

Not at all. Startups should aggressively look for traction and that’s my main job as a CMO now. But traction alone isn’t enough to make someone an entrepreneur — at least not when it comes to me.