🧠 Move twice as fast — the 3 pillars of startup traction
Reach your next milestone in half the time — without burning time or money on the wrong things.
Hey friends 👋
Finding traction in the market is simple.
It’s really f*ing hard, but it’s not complicated.
So I’m going to share with you today the exact framework we use with our Traction Lab portfolio companies to find rapid progress in the market. It’s just three pillars — surprisingly simply, but extraordinarily effective.
Let’s dive deep 👇
⏰ REMINDER ⏰
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Most startups struggle to find traction.
If you’ve been in the startup trenches as long as I have, you’ve seen (and made) the same mistakes I have:
♾️ Throwing everything at the wall — Founders try to do everything at once, without a structured path to prove what actually works.
🐿️ Chasing distractions — You see a competitor make a move, an investor asks for something new, a friend suggests a different marketing channel… suddenly, your focus is gone.
📏 Measuring the wrong things — Vanity metrics (like press mentions, social followers, pitch competition wins, and many others…) feel like progress but don’t actually prove traction.
What you need is structured momentum — a way to move forward with clarity, make real progress, and avoid getting stuck in an endless cycle of second-guessing.
It’s like trying to get to the Lonely Mountain: you need to know where it is; be able to measure and confirm that you’re actually getting closer to it; and show that the progress you and your Dwarvish companions are making is relatively quick.
This is where the 3 Pillars of Startup Traction come in.
Imagine a startup’s path to traction as a structure held up by three pillars. Each pillar holds up the business — without all three, your foundation crumbles.
The Three Pillars of Traction:
Traction Framework – A clear milestone that signals where you’re going, and what success looks like, along with the theory of what your business looks like once it hits that milestone.
Milestone-Based Progression — How you’ll get there, step by-step, as a roadmap of Decision Points to meet before advancing, keeping you focused and accountable.
Iterative Validation — A process of rapid experimentation, whereby you gather the data needed to make sure it’s working.
To make your journey to traction a little less “quest to the Lonely Mountain” and more “reliable, data-driven path forward,” let’s break down each pillar, starting with the foundation.
First, we need to define the destination:
1️⃣ The Traction Framework
Being a startup founder is kinda like being a dwarf trying to retake Erebor. There’s a far-off mountain you’re trying to get to, but you can’t just leap there.
It’s not a leisurely nature walk; it’s an expedition. It’s dangerous, and it takes days or weeks or months.
Often, you can’t even see the mountain through the dense forest foliage.
A map isn’t enough. You have to look for signals that you’re on the right track:
Is the river bank still to our right?
Are the stars oriented to our destination?
When we can see it, is the mountain getting larger?
etc.
Similarly, your job as an entrepreneur is to find the signals that you should be seeing if you’re getting closer to the Lonely Mountain — to the goal of a scalable business. But you can’t interpret them without a framework.
In the case of the journey to Erebor, the framework is a cartographic map of what’s in the known world vs what’s not yet known.
But in the case of a startup, what is the framework?
There’s surely no “map” to product-market fit…
And, unfortunately, we’re actually not trying to get to a mountain we can see. It’s even worse than that. We’re more like Percy Fawcett trying to find the the Lost City of Z, which we don’t even know for sure exists.
So before we can draw a map, we need to define what we’re actually chasing — and where we think it is. That starts with your startup core. Then, once we have that core defined, we need to define how we think we can get there.
I call this your “traction framework”. Let’s break it down:
Start with the next major milestone.
Because, without a clear milestone, your startup is just wandering aimlessly. You need to know where you’re going, why it matters, and how you’re going to get there.
An ideal milestone is 6–18 months out.
In the case of raising funds, that milestone might be something like, “We’re going to raise a $2M seed round in six months to accelerate growth.” Once you define that, you’ve got something tangible to reverse-engineer from.
But here’s the kicker — this milestone needs to be backed by a solid business hypothesis. Without a theory of what your business looks like when you hit that milestone, you’re just hoping the barrel you’re riding down river is heading in the right direction.
For example, when you aim for that $2M seed round, you’ll need more than just a pitch deck — you need to check off the 8 Ts of Fundability. These are:
Team – Do you have the right people in place to make this happen?
TAM (Total Addressable Market) – Is there enough room in the market for your product to scale?
Timing – Why is now the right time for your solution?
Traction – Do you have data or metrics to show there’s demand for your product?
Theory – Do you have a clear, scalable business model and a go-to-market strategy that makes sense?
Technology – Is your product defendable in the market?
Terms – Are your terms appealing to investors?
Tracking – Are you measuring the right metrics to prove your progress?
Once you can define these 8 Ts and identify where you stand, you can get to work bridging the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.
And that takes us to the next pillar:
2️⃣ Milestone-Based Progression
Now that you’ve defined your major milestone, you need to break it down into decision points — specific moments where you’ll pause and ask, “are we on the right track?”
Decision Points are critical junctures in our journey that mark a key decision-making or directional moment. It’s when we reach the crossroads: do we double-down, or do we change course?
And it’s always a data-driven decision.
Think of it like plotting your journey on our metaphorical map. If you’re trekking toward the mountain, you don’t just focus on the end goal. You focus on the waypoints along the way — places where you know you can check in, re-assess, and adjust.
Here are some example decision points in the path toward a fundraising milestone:
Validate customer segment – are we targeting the right early adopters?
Validate go-to-market strategy – are we acquiring customers efficiently?
Validate product-market fit – are customers actually using and paying for the product?
Each decision point has two roles:
Keeps you focused – no more wasting time on random distractions.
Forces key decisions – do you pivot, persevere, or pack it in?
What most startups get wrong is treating milestones like a distant dream. Instead, milestones need to be broken down into bite-sized decision points — this is how you make tangible progress.
They force you to define in advance what decisions you are making, what data you need in order to make them, and what a successful measurement looks like — all timed to a key inflection point in your journey.
But that’s still fairly macro, so we need the third pillar:
3️⃣ Iterative Validation
At the end of the day, your journey won’t be validated by a beautifully designed slide deck.
Only data validates progress.
That’s where iterative validation comes in. Once you’ve set your decision points, you need a process for gathering the data needed to make those decisions, testing whether or not your assumptions are true.
Never just “see what happens”.
Each experiment should be a falsifiable hypothesis — you’re testing a specific idea, not just hoping for something good to happen.
For example:
Hypothesis: If we run targeted LinkedIn ads for 30 days to our target customer segment, we’ll see a conversion rate of 10% and a cost per lead under $50.
Experiment: Run the ad campaign, track the results.
Outcome: Did we hit the targets? Yes = double down. No = pivot, persevere, or pack it in.
The key here is rapid experimentation. If something doesn’t work, pivot and move forward quickly. Don’t fall in love with your original idea if the market tells you it’s not right.
Iterative validation forces you to build in “feedback loops” — real data that keeps you aligned with your goals and keeps you from pouring resources into the wrong path. It helps you avoid wasting time, talent, and treasure on strategies that simply aren’t working.
The goal is to put in as few resources as possible to find out if you’re on the right track — because the wise founder proportions their effort to the evidence.
But what happens when you’re wrong?
In the world of startups, getting it wrong isn’t the worst thing that can happen — it’s ignoring the data that will kill you.
The beauty of the iterative validation process is that it teaches you to recognize when you’re on the wrong path early. Then, it gives you the tools to adjust.
In other words:
You have three options when your experiments fail:
🤷♂️ Minor Pivot – Small adjustments that get you closer to your goal (e.g., changing your ad targeting or tweaking your product).
😬 Major Pivot – Bigger changes that could alter the business (e.g., changing your target customer segment or rethinking your revenue model).
😅 Existential Pivot – A full stop and reassess. In the rare case when everything is wrong, you can reevaluate the entire business direction.
None of these options are “game over.”
(well… maybe some more than others)
But mostly, it just means you’ve got new data and a fresh start.
And guess what?
You’ll end up going much faster toward your next milestone because you’re validating your assumptions quickly, not waiting until the end to find out you were wrong.
These three pillars help you make rapid forward progress.
Most founders get stuck in two common traps:
Going all-in on a huge goal without testing whether it’s even achievable.
Delaying decisions because they’re unsure and waiting for more data before acting.
The 3 Pillars avoid both of these pitfalls:
The traction framework helps you avoid wandering off course by defining a clear milestone.
Milestone-based progression keeps you focused and accountable.
Iterative validation ensures you’re getting real data at each stage, so you’re not wasting time or resources.
This approach allows you to make progress twice as fast because you’re not making huge bets without checking the market first — nor doing anything that serves as a distraction from your roadmap.
Instead, you’re making small, calculated bets — scaling what works, and ditching what doesn’t.
You know… actually building a business.
Want to put this framework into action? Let’s talk. Grab a spot on my calendar →
Until next week,
—jdm
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