Hey friends 👋
Another wild week in the traction trenches. This one had everything: ads that don’t convert, features your customers ignore, startup poker analogies, and the birth of a mythical UX concept we’re now calling “The Kramer Throttle.”
If you’re just joining us, the video above is from our live Tuesday office hours on Substack — our AMA-style show where we take founder questions, tear into assumptions, and help you stop wasting time chasing ghosts.
Here’s what we tackled this week:
Ad clickthroughs with no conversions
Getting clicks? Great. No one signing up? That’s a problem. We walked through how to diagnose misalignment between your ad, your landing page, and your payoff. Hint: it’s not always the copy—it might be your entire theory of value.
Sunk cost fallacy, startup edition
When your side feature outperforms your “main” platform, you don’t double down on the bloated thing you wish had worked. You kill your darlings. Or at least run a few smart experiments to validate where the actual value lives.
Retention vs. Engagement: What are you really testing?
If users drop off after one session, is it a UX problem or a value problem? We dug into how to test that difference, and why it’s so important not to conflate “used it once” with “wants to pay for it.”
Investor questions you don’t have to answer (yet)
Yes, you need a go-to-market strategy. No, you don’t need a full-scale distribution engine pre-MVP. We broke down how to talk to angels about experiments — not just roadmaps.
The startup poker game
Making bets without evidence? You’re playing hands you shouldn’t be in. We talked pot odds, sunk costs, and why your next move has nothing to do with how much you’ve already invested.
If you’ve got a leaky landing page, confusing funnel metrics, or a favorite feature nobody uses — this one’s for you.
Over on LinkedIn…
We took things up a notch with a live experiment design teardown featuring Matt Klein of BoardReady.AI. The whole episode is a step-by-step demo of how we help founders break big, vague problems into specific, testable hypotheses. Think “traction therapy” meets science class.
Watch the full teardown here →
And on Instagram…
We answered two founder FAQs:
“What kind of proof actually moves the needle with investors?”
“Is this pipeline… or is it a polite no?”
Spoiler: If they tell you to follow up in a few weeks, that’s a no. We also broke down how to treat sales calls like data collection, not a begging tour.
Catch the replay on IG Reels →
Wanna join the chaos live?
We’re live every week:
Tuesdays 9am PT on Substack
Thursdays 9:30am PT on Instagram
Fridays 12pm PT on LinkedIn
Bring your questions, your traction woes, your failed features. Or submit ahead of time. We’ll be roasting assumptions, building experiments, and helping you avoid startup purgatory.
See you next time,
—jdm
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