Early Traction Looks Like 12 Calls a Week and a Spreadsheet You're Embarrassed to Show Anyone

I remember the exact moment I thought we'd made it at Sonic Linker. We'd just crossed 40 signups in our second month live. The dashboard looked great. The founder was excited. I updated my LinkedIn.

Then I pulled up the retention cohorts and saw that 87% of users never came back after day three.

Of the remaining 13%, half were the founder's friends testing it out. The other half? Maybe four people who looked like they actually gave a damn.

That's the gap nobody warns you about. What early traction looks like on a dashboard versus what it feels like when you're in the weeds trying to figure out if you have something real.

The vanity metrics will lie to you faster than you think

Signups feel amazing. They're concrete. You can screenshot them. You can put them in a deck.

But at Sonic Linker, those 40 signups taught me nothing about whether our AI linking tool actually solved a problem people had repeatedly. What taught me something was the four users who came back every single week, unprompted, and kept using the same workflow.

I started tracking a different number. Not signups. Not MAUs. Just: how many people used this thing three times in two weeks without us asking them to?

That number was six. Then eight. Then twelve.

That felt like traction. Not because it was big, but because it was consistent and unforced. Those users weren't there because we sent them an email or offered a discount. They were there because they had a job to do and we were the best way to do it.

At Finvestfx, I saw the same pattern from the other side. We had 20+ enterprise clients when I joined, but only about eight of them were actually sticky. The rest were in that dangerous middle zone: paying, but not really embedded. One leadership change or budget review away from churning.

The traction that mattered wasn't the contract count. It was how many clients had multiple users logging in daily, without their admin reminding them. That's the number I watched obsessively.

Traction feels like the same five people telling you variations of the same problem

Here's what I didn't expect: real traction doesn't feel like explosive growth. It feels like repetition.

At Sonic Linker, I did 12 to 15 user calls a week in the first three months. Most of them blurred together. But around week eight, I started hearing the exact same frustration in almost identical words from totally different user types.

"I have to rebuild this same link structure every time I start a new project."

Not similar problems. The same problem. Same language. Same context. Same moment in their workflow where they hit the wall.

That's when I knew we weren't just solving a problem I'd invented. We were solving something that already existed in people's heads, and they just didn't have a name for it yet.

This is the part that feels boring and repetitive when you're doing it. You're having the same conversation for the tenth time and you want to scream. But that repetition is the signal. If you're hearing ten different problems from ten different people, you don't have traction. You have confusion.

The spreadsheet test

I keep a stupid simple spreadsheet for every early stage thing I work on. Three columns:

• User name
• Last time they used the product (without us reaching out)
• One sentence on what they're actually using it for

If I can't fill in column three for most rows, or if every answer is different, I know we don't have traction yet. We have traffic.

Real traction is when that third column starts showing patterns. When you see the same use case five times, then ten times, then you stop bothering to write it down because it's obvious.

At Sonic Linker, it took us about six weeks to get to that point. Six weeks of me manually checking in with users, watching session recordings, and honestly just bothering people on calls until I understood what they were actually doing.

The traction didn't feel like a rocket ship. It felt like finally being able to predict what someone was going to say before they said it.

What I actually look for now

When I'm trying to figure out if something has early traction, I ignore the vanity dashboard. I ask myself:

• Can I name ten users and tell you exactly what problem we're solving for each of them?
• Are at least half of those users coming back weekly without me pinging them?
• Am I hearing the same problem described in near-identical language?

If the answer to all three is yes, that's traction. Even if it's only ten users. Even if the revenue is embarrassing. Even if your dashboard looks like nothing special.

Because traction isn't about scale. It's about signal. It's about knowing, with confidence, that if you put this thing in front of 100 more people like your current users, at least 10 of them will have the same reaction.

Everything else is just noise you're calling growth because it makes you feel better.