Traction Thinking

Traction Thinking

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🧠 Deep Dives
🔀 The Pivot
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🧠 Deep Dives

You’ve identified your customer… now try finding one
You’ve got a persona and an hypothesis, but no one to talk to. Here’s the four-step framework for finding your customers where they already are.
 • JDM
🧠 Your startup is a house of cards
You built for six months, launched, and… nobody cared. You assumed the customer, the problem, the channel, the messaging, the pricing, and the solution…
 • JDM
🧠 desperate > interested
You can have the perfect framework and still burn six months chasing the wrong people. Here’s how to find early adopters without guessing wrong or…
 • JDM
🧠 Stop pitching to people who will never buy
84% of the market buy—yet you're spending your finite resources trying to convert them anyway. Let's fix that. Here's the pyramid that finds the 16…
 • JDM
🧠 “I’d definitely pay for that” (is a lie)
They loved your demo and promised they’d buy. You celebrated product-market fit… then nobody signed. Here’s the four-ask framework to separate signal…
 • JDM
🧠 Traction isn't just sales. It's a ladder.
When you're so obsessed with closing deals that you skip the eight rungs before it that make the sale possible.
 • JDM
🧠 Your TAM is meaningless (and investors know it)
Queue the investor eye roll! “We’re targeting the $500B productivity market, and if we capture just 1%…” Yikes. Here’s why your top-down TAM kills…
 • JDM
🧠 You don't have users. You have lurkers.
Your churn problem isn't a product problem. Those "early adopters" aren't adopting anything. Here's why your engagement metrics are lying to you — and…
 • JDM
Why your pilots never convert to sales
You land the pilot, celebrate the traction, then watch it die at contract time. Here's why your 'validation' never turns into revenue — and how to fix…
 • JDM
The $200K lesson every founder learns the hard way
Three months and $200K down the drain because they were gambling instead of experimenting. Here's the step-by-step system to test your way to traction…
 • JDM
🧠 Your niche isn’t a slide — it’s the whole damn pitch
Your TAM isn’t a number, your GTM isn’t a grocery list, and your differentiation isn’t a feature dump. They’re all just your niche in disguise.
 • JDM
🧠 The investor feedback you're getting is probably wrong
Your pitch deck isn't the problem. Your business model is. The Investor Feedback Pyramid shows you how to separate real feedback from polite rejections…
 • JDM
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