Filling the holes in our pitch.

Week 11 of Creative Founder: The Most Important Thing to Fix

You can’t have revenue without traction, and you can’t get traction without a compelling product, and you can’t get a compelling product without…

Traction: People either want your product or they don’t.

You can’t make up numbers or emails the way you can endlessly design user interfaces, test colors, or revise copy at the comfort of your desk. You can’t make up emails or people to use your product. Traction takes the real work.

We came up with a plan of action to gain better traction in the market for three different audiences: seniors, their children, and advertising partners.

Janice designed flyers and posted them around senior centers in San Francisco. I launched 4 different Facebook ads to test different copy among both seniors and their children. Daniel worked on another Google AdWords campaign (which we’re currently awaiting approval for due to some technical DNS issues we were having — thanks a lot, Launchrock).

I also got the names of potential advertising customers and emailed their CEOs directly. In order to do this effectively, we first had to polish up our product UI with real content and build a story for it as a mini email pitch. The test worked pretty well — we got 3 out of 3 startup CEOs interested in purchasing lead ads from us, which helps validate our lead ads revenue model.

Sigh, is there any trick to gain traction faster?

Not really. At least nothing other than throwing a bunch of money at Google AdWords and hoping your copy makes sense. It takes time and testing cycles. I suppose the only trick would be running as many tests in as little time as possible — and making sure you actually learn from the results and adjust accordingly.

Sometimes you can get swept away by the newest project or test, and it can be easy to forget that building a startup is really just an infinite logical syllogism.