What Founders Don’t Do Enough Of, Part 1: Traction Testing
99% of startups fail, or was it 90%.. 95%? Not the point.
While it’s hard to know for sure what that number is, what we do know is that most of them do not make it.
Why is that?
The answer is terrifyingly simple - they build something the world does not need1.
What does it even mean?
To succeed, you need to build a business around a real customer problem. It is as simple as that. If there is no problem - there is no way you will be successful. Bottom line.
Once you’ve found that problem, you need to create a solution that really helps people solve it.
That is the foundation of a successful venture. We call it a problem-solution fit.
Many people don’t get that right. To make sure you do better, the first step is to talk to your potential customers. Not survey them. Talk. Connect to them on a human level. Understand them.
This helps you gain deeper insights into the customer’s life, their needs, pains, problems and motivations. This helps you understand if there is a problem indeed. A problem worth solving.
Some founders get that far (though not all). They read Talking to Humans, they read The Mom Test, they get it. They even have the courage to approach the real people and talk to them. If you’ve gotten that far - good job!
The question is though, what’s next?
Naturally, you might think “Now that I know there is a problem, I can build something and see if that solves it.”
While that’s better than building before you made sure there is actually a problem, it’s still not good enough. There is still something missing.
Here, I’d usually advise the founder on testing the value proposition first, before building the actual product. That conversation would go something like that:
Now you want to set up a quick landing page to test if your value proposition works for your customer. You need any help with that?
Yeah.. so I can build a page but once I have it, where do I share the link to it?
Ouch, now I see what the problem is. Do you?
While you were thinking about the problem, you might have overlooked something. You also need to know where to find your customer. And it’s just as important. Because if you don’t know “where to post the link” then.. well, then there is no business.
This’s been eye-opening for me lately to see how often the above conversation actually happens. And how little we talk about that.
The good news is - for the founders who don’t know where to “post the link” - there is this little trick we call traction testing (with a landing page).2
In a nutshell, your job is to put a landing page together, drive some (meaningful) traffic to it, see if people convert.
What this helps you learn is:
Do you know who the customer is?
Do you know where to get them from (channels)?
Do you have the right value proposition/ copy?
A quick 3-day test like that can answer all the above and tell you so much about the business you’re trying to build. It might also help uncover some of the areas you haven’t even thought about.
So do go ahead and try this out. Let me know how that went.
If you’re new to this, all you need is:
A quick & easy landing page builder (I use Landingi - they have a free trial - but any other would work)
Track every single link with URL Builder & bitly (use “convert URL to ShortLink” and your bitly account)
If you’ve done that before - you might find this Landing Page checklist helpful.
Going back to the “where do I post this link” question.. The short answer is - ask your customers. The long one will be in one of my next posts.
Stay tuned,
Lisa
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/
there are other ways to do a traction test, but I find the landing page one a good introduction and helpful in pretty much every single case (before you say “but what about B2B”, yes, for B2B just as fine).