Traction-biased

Default growing, vs. default thinking

I’ve noticed a trend among fast-growing startups that is… well, obvious. Just haven’t seen it talked about.

Some startups are biased towards traction, vs. others that are biased towards thinking.

Startups that are biased towards traction:

• Believe that their problems’ solutions generally emerge through growth and growth-related customer interactions (e.g., sales calls, onboarding calls, support conversations, etc.). This is how they figure out how to make their product great, their business model work, how they find their ICP, etc.

• As a result, they invest a lot of time and effort in generating traction: getting a high volumes of customer conversations, trials, purchases, whatever.

• Every negative thing that happens when they try to grow… they view as a bug in their growth system. It’s not a reason to shut their growth system down, and in fact it’s a reason to invest more effort in improving their growth system.

Startups that are biased towards thinking:

• Believe that they need to solve their problems before growing and interacting with a high volume of potential customers.

• As a result, they delay sales until the “product is ready” or their “research is complete”… thinking they can just turn growth on someday in the future once they have the right answer.

• Every negative thing that happens when they try to grow… they default to going back to the drawing board. Thinking more, building more, pausing on growth.

Being traction-biased is, I think, the best way to survive. We’re guaranteed to fail when we stay at the whiteboard, in theory-land; when we’re traction-biased, we at least have a chance to survive.

Being traction-biased is not something that’s only available to huge venture-backed scaleups with infinite cash, either. I believe traction-biased companies often raise big venture rounds because they are traction-biased, not the other way around.

And being traction-biased is better for your sanity as a founder. I default towards overthinking, and after a long, unproductive brainstorming session… I am exhausted and feel bad because I accomplished nothing.

And every fast-growing company I’ve seen, I would describe as traction-biased. Because obviously they are. Growth itself doesn’t solve all their problems, of course, but solutions to all their problems emerge in the process of growing and iterating.

I’m trying to become more traction-biased… are you?

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PS:

• Screw it, decided to launch another PMF Camp in December. Link to learn more + apply HERE. Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com any questions.

• Also screw it, we’re about to launch a free version of Waffle that you can use to deploy & manage simple, SOC 2 compliant infrastructure in AWS. Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com and I’ll get you hooked up with it before it’s publicly available.

• Fun fact: After last week’s “Gobblin’ Mode” joke, I immediately got food poisoning. Wrecked my weekend. The universe didn’t like that pun.