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Early traction is often small and noisy. Evaluators do not need large scale to be impressed. They need credible context that shows traction reduces uncertainty rather than being a vanity number.
How to present early traction well
- Define the cohort: who are these users and why they matter?
- Show the behavior: what do they actually do repeatedly?
- Explain movement: what changed and why did it improve?
- Acknowledge limits: what is still unstable or unproven?
What tends to backfire
- reporting signups with no activation
- claiming conversion rates without denominators
- implying scale when the sample is clearly tiny