Built to fail? Why early traction should start before your product does

Imagine a startup founder who’s just spent the last six months perfecting their digital product. They’ve poured absolutely everything into it: sleepless nights consisting of refining user experience, tweaking lines of code, and even holding off on launch until “just one more feature” is added. But when they finally go live… there’s nothing. Crickets.

No downloads, no engagement, and no real traction. And they’re far from alone in this. So what went wrong? Well, without clear signs of market traction before launch, a startup won’t be set up for long-term success or spark investor interest (Golden Egg Check).

We sat down with Scott Stonham, Director of Impact Builder at ASquared, to explore why early traction can’t be an afterthought, and how founders should start building momentum through distribution (go-to-market strategy, sales, and marketing) before even a single line of code is written.

Why do you think distribution is still such an afterthought for early-stage founders?

Scott: Many founders start their businesses to solve a pain they’ve experienced. Building a startup isn’t easy in any sense, so the pain is often perceived as being big enough and obvious enough for the founder to commit to the journey.

However, this can sometimes lead to what we describe as ‘founder hallucination’. 

Founder hallucination often includes the misconception that everyone cares about the problem as much as the founder does and enough to act on it. With that, there can often be a belief that the product will be so good at solving the problem that it will almost sell itself, and that there’s a captive audience just sitting there waiting for it.

While this is sometimes true, and indeed can be manufactured to be true, it’s preferable to validate it with data, research and iterating ahead of building. Most of the time, however, it isn’t, and reaching the intended audience means breaking through the noise of everyday life.

In startup terms, this is what “distribution” really means. It’s not just making the product available, but actively figuring out how to get it into the hands of the right people at scale. Of course, there are other reasons too, and this mostly but not exclusively applies to first time founders. And as Maddyness notes, distribution (a key factor) remains one of the most neglected parts of startup building.

What are some practical ways founders can test traction before the product is built?

Scott: Startups with demonstrable traction are more likely to find both product market fit and investment faster, so it’s important to get that traction as early as possible.

In a practical sense, traction is going to look different for every startup. For business-to-business (B2B) companies, Letters of Intent (LOI), Memorandums of Understanding (MOU), pre-orders and pilots (ideally paid) are all extremely helpful and quite common ways to show traction.

But like with business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, B2B could also look to demonstrate traction through high-quality followers, newsletter subscribers and waiting lists. 

I mention ‘high-quality’ because while it’s relatively easy to grow a large mailing list, it's far more challenging to build one made up of people who are ready to part with their cash or time for the product or service on offer. 

Converting non-committal support and encouragement into real commitment is important. This can be achieved (and demonstrated) in many ways, including pre-orders, donations or crowd-investment, and even a donation of time and reputation from influential figures. Offering a certain level of skin-in-the-game for potential users & customers shows supporters are willing to back their enthusiasm with real action.

We often hear “build it and they will come.” Is there a healthier mindset to adopt instead?

Scott: Unfortunately, “build it and they will come” doesn’t really happen. 

It’s like the concept of an overnight success… it only happens if a lot of time and effort has already been put in. The same goes for products: you can’t expect immediate success without validation and adaptation.

It’s incredibly important that founders challenge their instinctive biases by seeking specific, actionable market feedback as soon as possible. Anecdotally, we’ve seen that for every hour spent in this research and validation stage can save ten hours further down the path.

You’ve got to accept that your first idea will not be the best, and that’s okay. A healthier mindset is to focus on learning fast from real users and adapting faster. 

Can founders start selling before the product exists?

Scott: Oh yes, this is gold. 

I once had the chance to work with one of the original VPs from Oracle. He said to me, “You’re either building or selling. There’s no other role in a company”. The thing is, as a startup you’re doing both all the time.

If you can leverage the techniques mentioned above, the process of trying to make sales can significantly help direct your product or service development and give confidence to any future investors. 

But beware. When selling a future product, it’s important not to promise something you can’t deliver, and make sure you tread carefully when pivoting away from something someone has already bought in to.

As another of my previous startup mentors said to me, “delight those you can, release those you can’t”.  Simply put, you can’t please everyone all the time. But, if you can master turning a let-down into a win-win, you’ll create ambassadors from your ideal client profile (ICP) as well as your ‘crappiest client profile’ (CCP).

If a founder has already built their MVP and isn’t seeing adoption or growth, what should they do next?

Scott: You’ve got to find out why. The chances are that if you’re in this state then you’ve probably already adopted a lot of assumptions and guesswork in your strategy. Now you need to supplement your instinct with data.

A lack of adoption doesn’t automatically mean your product is broken. More often, it’s a sign that something needs adjusting. Maybe it isn’t serving your users in the way they expect, isn’t showing up in the right places yet, or is facing hurdles like onboarding friction. Either way, this is all useful insight to act on.

And there are many ways you can obtain that data; from user interviews and paid-advertising to split testing different landing page messaging. The key thing is to gather real world data to help better inform your decision making going forward. All the better if this has been the focus of your strategy up to this point, not just a pivot now!

Once armed with data, sanity check it. And if you want to go further, try testing the anti-thesis to prove the inverse of what you discovered. 

Acknowledge that the answers you get are never perfect, use the information to adjust your plan - whether that means accelerating marketing spend, rebuilding your app, investing in building a channel, or just keep going as you are - and be ready to test again. Never stop testing.