Non-obvious signs of early traction — and how to spot them

This week, we asked founders to recall the moment they knew their startup was primed for takeoff — long before they had any splashy numbers to show for it.

Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction — And How to Spot Them

A viral launch. Leads pouring in. Off-the-charts usage.

These are the classic hockey-stick-shaped trends founders hope for in the opening stretch of a startup’s life.

Metrics are deservingly the gold standard for assessing your progress toward PMF and beyond — it’s why we wrote a 10,000+ word essay with detailed benchmarks from the early days of now-established B2B startups like Looker, Vanta and Plaid.

But hard numbers aren’t the only way to gauge how things are going. Especially in those first few months (or even years) when you can’t calculate the typical leading indicators yet, how do you know if you’ve got something that could really work?

For the latest article on The Review, we revisited the conversations we’ve had with founders throughout our Paths to PMF series to unearth the most surprising answers to that question. For many of these founders, the earliest sparks of traction were subtle, or didn’t seem promising at all — easy to miss in the moment. But in hindsight, they stand out as the harbinger of the success that followed.

The signals these founders identified came from a range of sources: their customers, their industry and even their own mental state. Here’s a taste of their answers:

• Customers are complaining about the product. At first blush, a ton of grievances from early customers might make you think that you’ve built the wrong thing. But for Gong’s Eilon Reshef and GOAT’s Eddy Lu, getting complaints from customers was actually an indicator that they cared enough about the product to give the founders honest feedback.
• There’s some impressive competition. The sheer existence of competitors may not mean much, but the way Vercel CEO and founder Guillermo Rauch sees it, when there are other players in the market who make you sweat, you’re onto something. “When something is really needed, you’ll find there are lots of very intelligent people at other organizations trying to build a version of it.”
• Founder morale is rising. Productboard CEO and founder Hubert Palan took an unorthodox approach to evaluating the startup’s progress: He turned inward. “I measured my own happiness as a proxy for the customer's happiness. At first, it was completely up and down. Eventually, I started feeling much better about where we were headed once the feedback became consistently more positive.”

These stories offer an encouraging reminder to builders just starting out that progress isn’t always obvious in real time. Just because the numbers aren’t there yet doesn’t mean they aren’t on the cusp of ticking up and to the right.

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review Editors

Recommended resources:

-Tara Seshan’s framework for communicating tradeoffs effectively (you can find more of her product wisdom in her Review article)

-The trendy growth hacks that don’t actually work

-Review favorite Will Larson’s thoughts on how to translate executives’ ambitious ideas into practical tactics