Traction Does Not = Revenue

Today we’re following on from our Angel series, and in honour of our collaboration with Tech SY and their idea validation grant, we’re talking about what traction really means…

But first, today’s highlights:

🪜 Tickets for Climb 26 have gone on sale already and if you are a startup under 12 months old you can get tickets early bird for £75. Climb 25 was ace, 26 will no doubt be even better.

🛠️ The grant applications for Tech SY’s idea validation programme are open. Trove are providing 90 support for any founders pre-traction in the South Yorkshire area - FULLY FUNDED. Know anyone who would benefit? Send them the link.

Traction does not equal revenue.

Revenue is lovely. Investors like it, founders love it, and your bank manager certainly sleeps better at night because of it.

But early in your business, chasing revenue only can lead to leaving money on the table as you chase the quick cash.

In the iMVP framework, we define traction as evidence that customers care enough about your solution to engage meaningfully, even if money hasn’t changed hands yet.

If you’re pre-revenue, it doesn’t mean you’re pre-traction. It just means you need to show momentum another way.

The real signals of traction at an early stage look more like this:

• User Behaviour: Are people using your product repeatedly, even in rough prototype form?

• Feedback Quality: Are they offering constructive insights, or just polite “Looks great!” comments?

• Referrals: Are early users telling others, unprompted?

• Workflow Integration: Are users starting to slot your product into their daily habits?

In my past role, our CEO had an idea for a new all-in subscription model, one that could potentially 5x our monthly recurring revenue per customer.

Rather than rushing to build the entire solution and creating a mountain of work, we kept it simple. We wrote a one-pager describing the concept and pitched it to the next ten SMEs who landed in our sales pipeline.

Out of those ten conversations, five businesses expressed serious interest. That was enough signal for us to keep going.

So we took it further: two customers agreed to trial the new model. They knew it was a pilot, so they were forgiving of any rough edges. Between them, they had 10 to 20 users each, a decent test bed to gather real-world data.

That trial let us refine the offering, collect genuine user feedback, and build a waitlist for the full rollout.

We hadn’t shipped a new product yet, and we hadn’t booked revenue on the new model, but we had traction. Concrete, testable evidence that customers were willing to change how they worked (and paid) if we solved their problem well enough.

That’s the essence of early traction: evidence of demand, not just revenue on the books.

So how do you build real traction before the revenue slide?

A few iMVP principles we coach founders on:

✅ Measure what matters. Instrument your prototype or MVP so you can see which features are sticky and which gather dust. Data beats gut feel every time.

✅ Turn qualitative into quantitative. Collect testimonials, but also track metrics: session lengths, task completions, feature usage rates. Investors respect numbers—even small ones.

✅ Show momentum, not perfection. A small group of engaged users is more convincing than a wide sea of lukewarm interest.

✅ Create a traction roadmap. Map the steps from initial curiosity → regular use → willingness to pay. Each milestone is a win worth sharing.

Revenue is just one flavour of traction. If you’re not there yet, prove momentum in other ways, and keep the conversation real.

Get your score

Want to know how your idea stacks up? Take the Trove traction calculator to see how your idea stacks up before you pitch, build, or raise a penny.

You may have seen this one before but its a good one - Ashley Tate giving us a brilliant example of what traction really is.

See you at the same time next week.

Carl.

P.S. I’ve been reading the following from the beehiiv team. Some great insights. Give it a go you might find something useful too.