

Ask HN: What is "traction"? - coryl

Hi guys, I've heard this buzz word thrown around a lot, mostly in the web 2.0 startup crowd. A vc also asked me once what our plan to "get traction" was.<p>So, curious to know what your thoughts are about the definition of traction, and how startups go about gaining it. Thanks
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pedalpete
To keep it simple, traction is customers or users.

How will you get users to your site, what will make them return. What makes it
sticky (possibly a connection as to where the term traction came from?).

How much traction (visits/users) is probably dependent on your stage and the
market. = Now the question to the community is how much traction do you need
to show? How many users/visits = traction. Unfortunately, that I can't answer.

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nostrademons
I think a reasonable definition is "customers/users come seeking _you_ out
instead of you having to sell them each individually".

You can be profitable without having traction, if you happen to land a couple
big contracts through sheer force of salesmanship. (One of my previous
employers was like this.) And you can have traction without profits - Twitter
is the obvious example. The important thing is whether your users are looking
for _you_ to fill a need that they have, or whether you're looking for _users_
to try and figure out what need you're solving.

Also, you can have traction and yet still rely on a big salesforce. Oracle's a
good example: companies go seeking out Oracle when they have a big database
problem, but they still need to talk to a salesperson to figure out how to
integrate it with their specific needs and haggle out a price.

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duffbeer703
If your car is stuck in snow and ice, throwing some sand or kitty litter under
the wheels can help you get out.

For a startup, kitty litter probably won't help -- you need an enthusiastic
customer, good media coverage, in essence a "break". The barrier to entry for
web firms is very low... what makes you different from the next guy? (A: Not
what you do, but how.)

