Ask HN: Is a bad traction a judgment call?

[ilyaovchinnikov]

Hi, there are 2 types of traction

Just posting somewhere (it can be ph, hn, post on reddit) -> Thousands of users -> Heaps of subscriptions. Instant traction that doesn't stop. These are usually the guys who make 5-10k$ MRR in 2 months

hard growth. The all action from point 1 and another plus 100's of different actions (article writing, google ads, cold emails and lots and lots of stuff) - hard and slow growth. Thousands of dollars of investment in advertising and marketing hypothesis testing. Hard and slow growth, scrambling forward. And after years, you come to your long awaited 1-2k$ of revenue.

And so I'm wondering if there's anyone out there who found themselves in point 2 (I'm there) and was able to turn the tide.

Would love to hear your stories.

[talldayo]

There's a whole lot more than just two types of traction. What you've identified are two sides of a ROI timeline, one where your growth is immediate and another where your growth is gradual. Between those two extremes is an entire gradient of success and failure cases that only partially depends on your talent as a marketer. Treating traction as a binary state is precisely how you kill off a successful product before it takes off, or how you promote a complete stinker without realizing it's mostly trash. Your traction is the sum of a huge number of causal influences, not the least of which being if your product is actually good.