[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.