Naval Ravikant‘s definition of traction is: ‘Quantitative evidence of market demand.’
Traction, in my view, is not just about users. It is about users using your product at the price-point that you eventually want them to buy at. Everything else is about users taking advantage of an ‘offer’ with no guarantees that ‘usage during offer’ will translate into ‘traction’.
But the answer to the question above is that it depends on a variety of factors.
If you are in a business where there is precedence of the revenue model, business model, price-points, etc. working well for others, then there will be less tolerance to, you not having adequate revenues with whatever traction you have.
However, if you are in a category where getting to a reasonable scale to use that as a competitive advantage, then focusing on tactics to get traction, even if that means at the cost of revenues, could be acceptable to some.
This post was originally published on The Hub For Startups – Content and resources to help Startups start up.
