The Traction Roadmap

A powerful methodology for shifting big dreams into actionable plans, and for early evaluation of your business ideas.

Work backwards from the vision to calculate tangibly what it means for associated short term goals. (To get to X in 3 years, we'd need to hit y active users/subscriber/... in the next 6 months) 

Building backwards from an exciting vision into associated short term goals serves as a powerful reality check.

The staged approach also allows you take the time you need in early stages to put learning above cosmetic growth. (e.g. paid ads driving people into a leaking sales funnel) ("don't fill a leaking bucket") 

Full slide-deck, from LEANSTACK, here.

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Selected slides: 

The 7 key metrics. A slight adaptation of the Pirate Metrics (AARRR) 

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According to the model, traction matters more than anything else, and should be the key focus for building your business roadmap: 

Using a very basic business model, work backwards to make it more tangible.

Example of a very basic business model:

Working backwards (simplified example):

But what does it take to get 8000+ new customers? 

SaaS products report (on average) 1% paid conversion. --> We need 800 000+ new visitors a year. --> 2000 new visits a day.

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This sounds daunting. Perhaps we can tweak the model a bit: 

Perhaps we can double our pricing without losing half of the customers: 

If we could pull this off, here's the new calculation: 

This is perhaps a bit more manageable than the initial 8000 per year? 

That's 500+ new visitors per day. (Assuming the same 1% paid conversion rate) 

At the very least it gives us a more concrete indication of what various business models mean for execution. I.e. we're better placed to weight up the options! (based on short term target realities rather than long term big numbers that don't really mean anything in the here and now) 

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Startup growth is non-linear. 10X is really just (roughly) 3 doublings.

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