Traction Lab

Founder market fit

Build evidence before you build too much product

Starting something new means making important decisions when you know the least. Which users should you start with? Is the problem important enough for them to act? What is the smallest thing worth building? And what evidence would justify investing more?

The danger is rarely a shortage of ideas. It is moving too far, too fast, on assumptions that have never really been tested — ice, where the company needed firm ground. Treating that ice as solid is how startups die.

Traction Lab helps founders turn those assumptions into questions that can be answered with evidence from the right people — before unnecessary time, money and product are committed.

The aim is not certainty. It is to make the next important decision with better evidence.

Find the people who can tell you whether there is something worth building

Not all positive feedback is useful evidence.

Friends may love the idea. Potential users may say they would use it. Early enthusiasts may be fascinating — and completely unrepresentative of the market you eventually need.

What matters is finding people whose behaviour already suggests that the problem matters. They may already be working around it, spending money or time on it, accepting an imperfect alternative, or actively trying to solve it.

Working with the right people helps you answer progressively harder questions:

  • Is the problem real enough?
  • Who feels it most strongly?
  • What outcome matters to them?
  • What are they doing about it today?
  • What would they actually change or pay for?
  • What is the smallest product worth testing?
  • And when has the evidence become strong enough to invest further?

Sometimes the evidence strengthens the idea.

Sometimes it changes the product, the target user or the route to market.

And sometimes the most valuable result is discovering early that an idea does not deserve another six months of your life.

That is progress too.

The next thing that would kill it

Until a startup is on firm ground, the work is a sequence of risks — not a pile of research.

Every sequence starts from the same question: what is the next biggest thing that would kill this startup if we got it wrong?

Then the order. A few uncertainties can be tested in parallel. Most of them have to be taken one at a time, until the company is standing on firm ground. The first of them is a pair, not a single item: the problem, and the user who has it. Get that duo wrong, and everything built afterwards is built on ice.

Part of the work is becoming expert in the problem, soon enough to walk into a conversation armed. The person across the table may have owned the subject for years and still know less of what is happening now — they have not done the recent rounds, so they are no longer as up to date as the problem is. Recency is the advantage.

What moves a founder is wanting to do the work. Iain’s role is to create that want: he cannot assign it. When several startups are in the work at the same time, what one team has just learned becomes a concrete illustration for the others. A peer who has already replaced an assumption with evidence carries the point further than another explanation of it.

From an idea to evidence you can act on

Three moves, in order. Each one earns the next.

1

Find the right people

Identify potential early users from evidence of what they already do — not simply from what they say they might do. The goal is to find people whose behaviour suggests they have a problem worth solving.

2

Learn before deciding

Explore what has actually happened: the problem, its consequences, existing workarounds, alternatives tried, what triggers action and what a better outcome would need to change. We use recent behaviour wherever possible, rather than asking people to predict what they might do.

3

Build only what the evidence has earned

Use what you learn to sharpen the first target users, the value proposition and the smallest useful product or test. Then go back to the market. Each step should earn the next one — from problem evidence, to a product worth testing, to the first users willing to engage, use, pay and eventually provide evidence that traction may be repeatable.

Experienced enough to challenge you. Curious enough to let the evidence win.

Iain Wallace has worked as a CEO, CRO and CMO and has coached more than 600 startup and technology leaders.

Since 2015, he has helped founders and product teams turn uncertain product questions into evidence they can use to make decisions.

Traction Lab is deliberately practical.

We won’t tell you that every idea can succeed. We won’t ask users to design your product for you. And we won’t confuse enthusiasm with demand.

We help you decide what needs to be true, what you need to learn next, who can provide credible evidence and what that evidence justifies doing.

Because the objective isn’t to follow a startup process correctly. It’s to discover, as quickly and intelligently as possible, whether you are building something enough of the right people will actually choose.

Have an idea you’re serious about — but assumptions you’d rather test before building around them?

Let’s talk.

Talk to Traction Lab

Address

44, rue Laborde
75008 Paris
France