Glossary
Traction
Evidence that people want this, stated in numbers rather than adjectives.
Customers, revenue, usage, retention, growth rate. What it is not: signups nobody returned to, a waitlist, meetings held, press coverage, or partnerships announced but not live.
At pre-seed, traction can legitimately be small. What cannot be substituted for it is a large number counting something that does not matter. Picking the flattering metric is itself a signal investors read.
Related terms
- Product-market fit — The point where the market pulls the product out of you.
- Retention — How many customers are still there after a given time.
- Vanity metric — A number that reliably goes up and predicts nothing.
Read next
See where this number sits in the rubric
The GTM Score is published in full, check by check, so you can see exactly what each figure is worth before you go looking for it.
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