Traction is your startup product's or idea’s engagement with market or customer adoption. Traction is a general term and acquires a different parameter depending on your business building stage. In order of importance, it is demonstrated through profit, revenue, customers, pilot customers, non-paying users, and verified hypotheses about customer problems. And their rates of change.

TractionMate works with all kinds of new businesses in search of product market fit. They may be B2C or B2B; entirely online or partly online; from any geography. The projects that we work can be from a diverse stage of product development - from a stage when you just have an idea to a stage where you have a landing page or an MVP or some functional product ready.

The answer to this question is simple. Why does a user invest in your product - in terms of money, or time? The user does it only when what you are trying to do resonates with the pain point that he or she has. The search to find a solution for the pain point or an expression of frustration about not being able to find it, are the keys to identify ideal users.

When you launch a new product, it is important that you get a bunch of early users who are as much super excited about your product as much you are. Because only then, they use the product frequently and tell you what more can be done and how. We call these users who use the product actively as ideal users.

We locate them in places where they either are searching for solutions or where they are sharing their frustrations about not being able to find solutions.

During the working with the past projects, we do have some contact details of people/ businesses of varied range. But, that’s not the path we take to work on a new project. We dig in and locate the ideal users for new project from the point of view of the pain point it is trying to solve.

We experiment with a few traction channels and discover what works to reach them in the most efficient and effective way. At any point of time, we could be working on 4 to 5 channels.

TractionMate searches for and get to the persons (or businesses) that are in search of a pain point that you are trying to resolve, individually and manually. We strike a conversation with them about the context of their pain point and when relevant, invite them to sign up.

In early startup building, quality is more important than quantity. TractionMate brings on a few (10, 20, 30 .. or 100 or more, depending on the context of your startup's business model) users who would use the product actively; rather than bringing in thousands who will remain in-active after signups.

We don't give advice or prepare plans. We do hands-on co-execution with you and your team.

The typical timeline would involve the first 5 to 10 days spent into brainstorming and researching possible pain points, value propositions and segments so that we zero down on the potential set to get started on outreach. At the end of this phase, the outreach - either cold messages or connecting on platforms etc. would start with 5- 6 numbers, to begin with, increasing to about 20 - 25 in 8 - 10 days. This will help us get some pointers on what works in terms of the hypothesis that we built and also in terms of messaging.

An early founder has multiple roles to play and many things to attend to, whereas this (traction building) is the only thing we do, so you get a clear focus about this when you work with us. Certain things like an approach or templates of cold messages are already tested, so you don’t need to spend energy to re-invent them. Lastly, we bring in many new channels and out-of-box thinking when it comes to locating ideal users.

The plain simple answer - whatever it takes to get you ideal users. In a worst situation, if we dont get a good response, we would then get insights as to what else could work.

If you have more than 2 projects to work on simultenously, we can talk about a customised pricing. But hurry. Currently, we take up 7 - 8 projects at any given time, to ensure adequate attention for all.

The early stage signifies a significant work in customer discovery and validation and therefore it doesnt justify a commission based fee structure. Additionally, in the current set up, an equity tie up is too not feasible for now.

When there is any minor bug fixing work needed that doesnt affect the functionality (if applicable) of the product, then traction building works continues at normal pace. However, if theer is a major developement work, we can put a pause for the period required.