Read in
8
min
Stop Chasing Investors Until You’re Ready - Focus on Traction First
In this post, we’ll explain why traction matters more than early funding. We’ll define what “traction” means in practical terms and highlight common mistakes founders make when they prioritize fundraising prematurely. We’ll also give examples of what traction could look like for different types of apps, from social platforms to B2B tools. Finally, we’ll show how BrainBox Apps helps founders build MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and gain traction, setting you up for fundraising success when the time is right. Let’s dive in!
Author
Akshat Chaturvedi
Published on
Oct 24, 2025
Blog Categories
Funding
Minimum Viable Products
As an early-stage startup founder, it’s tempting to pitch to every investor you meet. After all, funding seems like the lifeblood of growing your app idea. But chasing investors too soon can be a costly distraction. The smarter path? Focus on startup traction – get users, gather feedback, maybe even earn early revenue – before you start seeking funding.
Why Traction Matters More Than Early Funding
Getting funded is not success in itself – having a product that people love is. Investors will eventually want to see that people are using (and ideally paying for) your app. In fact, lack of traction or customers is one of the most common reasons startup fundraising efforts fail, because investors need proof that your idea is wanted in the market. If you approach investors with nothing but an idea, you’re likely to hear, “Come back when you have more users or revenue.”
Traction is essentially evidence that your business is working. It shows that you’ve identified a real problem and started solving it for real users. This matters more in the early days than a glossy pitch deck or ambitious projections. As the Techstars startup accelerator advises, meeting investors too early – without sufficient traction – can be a waste of valuable time. Every hour spent cold-emailing VCs or tweaking your pitch could instead be spent improving your app and talking to customers.
Moreover, if you focus on traction first, you’ll be in a much stronger position when you do fundraise. With user growth or revenue in hand, you can negotiate better terms and attract investors who were waiting on the sidelines for proof. Some founders even find they need less funding than they thought, because early traction opens up revenue streams. (In fact, early revenue is often called the best funding of all – it gives you capital without dilution and proves your business works, which in turn excites investors!)
What Is “Traction” for a Startup?
“Traction” is a buzzword you’ll hear often, so let’s demystify it. In simple terms, traction means momentum in your startup’s growth. It’s the tangible progress that shows your product is gaining market acceptance. Traction can be demonstrated in a few ways:
User Growth: Are people signing up or downloading your app? For a consumer app, traction might be measured in active users (e.g. monthly active users or daily active users) and how quickly that user base is growing.
User Engagement & Retention: Do users stick around and use your app regularly? High engagement (like time spent in the app, number of sessions per user) or good retention rates (users returning week after week) are strong indicators of traction. It shows users find real value in your solution.
Revenue or Early Sales: Nothing says traction like actual paying customers. Even a small amount of early revenue (subscriptions, in-app purchases, etc.) is powerful evidence that people find your product worth paying for. Recurring revenue (like monthly subscriptions in a SaaS app) is especially attractive, as it shows sustainable demand.
Market Validation: If your app isn’t monetizing yet, you can still show validation through things like user feedback, waitlist signups, pilot projects, or letters of intent from potential customers. Positive testimonials or users willingly participating in a beta program can count as traction too – it signals genuine interest.
Think of traction as proof of concept: it proves that your target audience has a problem and that your solution can solve it. For example, if you built a task-management app and 1,000 users organically signed up and use it every week, that usage is proof you’re solving a problem for them. Traction doesn’t have to mean huge numbers; it just needs to be meaningful progress that validates your business. A startup with 500 highly engaged users and a few paying customers is in a better spot than one with zero users and a fancy business plan.
There’s a common catch-22 for founders: investors want traction before they invest, but you feel like you need investment to get traction. The way out of this paradox is to start small and lean – build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to begin gathering traction without a massive budget. In the next sections, we’ll discuss avoiding early fundraising pitfalls and how to get that initial momentum.
Common Mistakes Founders Make by Chasing Investors Too Soon
Many first-time founders make similar mistakes when they put fundraising ahead of building their business. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid:
Pitching with Just an Idea (No MVP or Users): Investors rarely fund ideas on paper. If all you have is a concept and no prototype or users, spending months pitching is usually a dead end. It’s a mistake to assume that a great idea alone will attract funding. Smart founders instead channel that time into creating an MVP and signing up the first users.
Vanity Metrics Over Real Users: In an effort to impress investors, some startups focus on vanity metrics (like social media followers or website visits) that don’t actually prove product-market fit. These numbers might look good in a pitch, but they’re hollow if you don’t have authentic user engagement. It’s better to have 50 active, happy users giving you feedback than 5,000 signups who never use the app. Don’t chase superficial growth just to look “big” for investors – focus on metrics that truly indicate traction (e.g. retention, daily use, revenue).
Neglecting the Product and Customer Feedback: Fundraising is time-consuming; if you dive into it too early, you risk neglecting your product development and users. Founders who are constantly in pitch meetings may stop talking to their actual customers. This is dangerous – you might miss critical feedback that could improve your app or pivot your strategy. Ignoring your early users in favor of investor attention is a recipe for building something no one wants. Always prioritize learning from users over pleasing potential investors.
Burning Runway on Pitching: If you have limited funds (which most early startups do), spending those resources on flights to meet VCs, fancy pitch materials, or startup competitions can burn through your runway. This can leave you with an unfinished product and no investor on board – a worst-case scenario. A better strategy is to use your limited budget to get a working product and some traction, which in turn makes fundraising easier later. As a bonus, gaining traction can sometimes extend your runway via early revenues or by attracting a small angel investment on better terms.
Demoralization from Early Rejection: Chasing investors too soon often leads to a string of “no” responses, which can demotivate your team. It’s easy to take investor rejections personally or start doubting your idea if you hear “come back later” repeatedly. Realize that “no for now” doesn’t mean your idea is bad – it often just means you need more proof (traction!). Instead of getting discouraged, use that feedback as motivation to push your product further. Each feature improvement or new user you gain brings you closer to a “yes” down the line.
Remember, investors are not saviors for a product that hasn’t found its footing. Traction is the true validation that de-risks your startup in the eyes of investors. Avoid these mistakes by keeping your eye on the real prize: delighted users and a product that solves a real problem.
Build an MVP First and Prioritize Users (Traction Over Perfection)
How do you actually start gaining traction without a big bank account? The answer is to build an MVP and get it into the hands of users as early as possible. An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a simplified version of your app that delivers your core value proposition with just essential features. It’s not your full dream product – it’s the smallest functional product that can be used by real customers. The goal of an MVP is to test your idea in the real world, gather feedback, and iterate, all with minimal time and cost.
Building an MVP offers several benefits for traction-hungry startups:
Learn What Users Actually Want: With an MVP, you can quickly find out which features users love, which they don’t use, and what new problems or ideas they suggest. This user feedback is gold. It helps you refine the product-market fit. It’s much better to learn these insights with a simple MVP than after spending a year and a fortune building a full product based on assumptions.
Save Time and Money: Developing a polished, feature-rich app can take many months and a large budget. In contrast, starting lean with an MVP saves time and money. You focus only on the key features, so you can launch sooner. This lean approach is critical because early-stage startups have limited resources. Every week counts. As one startup product expert put it, “A minimum viable product helps test market demand, validate your idea, and collect valuable feedback before scaling”. In short, MVP = faster launch + lower cost, which means you can begin accruing traction earlier.
Prove (or Disprove) Your Concept: An MVP allows you to validate your core assumptions. For example, if your hypothesis is that busy parents will use a homework-planning app for their kids, build a bare-bones version of it and see if they actually do. If the idea doesn’t resonate, you can pivot or tweak the product before you’ve sunk too much time. If it does resonate, even on a small scale, that’s the traction signal you need to justify expanding the product – and eventually approaching investors. In a way, an MVP protects you from over-investing in a concept that doesn’t work and guides you toward what users truly want.
Early Revenue Opportunities: Sometimes an MVP can even start bringing in a little money. Perhaps you charge a few early customers for a premium feature, or you run a pilot project that a client pays for. This early revenue, no matter how small, is incredibly valuable. It not only extends your financial runway but also proves to outsiders that customers find enough value to pay. Generating revenue on an MVP is like traction on steroids – as mentioned earlier, it’s often the best kind of funding for an early startup.
Stronger Story for Investors: When you do decide to pitch investors, having an MVP with actual users puts you in a different league than someone with just slides and dreams. You can tell a story backed by facts: “We launched our MVP three months ago, now have 2,000 users, and our user base is growing 20% each month with a 30% retention rate. We even have five companies paying for our pro plan.” That is music to an investor’s ears compared to, “We have an idea and some market research.” By focusing on product and users first, you build credibility and leverage for fundraising later on.
The bottom line: build something people can use, as soon as you can. Don’t worry that it’s not perfect – it won’t be, and that’s okay. You’ll improve it quickly once real users are engaging with it. Your early adopters are your partners in development; involve them, listen to them, and iterate. This user-centric approach will naturally create the traction you need. Meanwhile, you’ll be developing a much sharper understanding of your business than any amount of pitching could give you.
(Need help building an MVP quickly? We’ll cover how BrainBox Apps can make this process faster and easier for you, later in the post.)
Examples of Traction for Different Types of Apps
“Traction” can mean different things depending on the type of app or product you’re building. Let’s look at a few scenarios to make it concrete. Here are examples of what early traction might look like for various kinds of apps:
Social Networking App: Your traction might be measured in active users and engagement. For example, suppose you built a new photo-sharing app. Early traction could be 5,000 people signed up in the first three months, with 2,000 of them posting photos every week. If those users are spending an average of, say, 10 minutes a day in the app and inviting their friends, that’s a strong sign of engagement. You might also track a retention metric – e.g., 30% of users are still active after 30 days. These numbers demonstrate that a community is forming and people are finding value in the network.
B2B SaaS Application: For a business-oriented web or mobile app (think productivity tool or enterprise software), paying customers and usage frequency are key traction indicators. Let’s say you have a project management SaaS. Traction could look like 10 teams (or small companies) using the product regularly, of which 5 have converted to paid subscriptions. If those customers use your software daily as part of their workflow, that’s excellent traction. Even if the absolute revenue is modest, the fact that businesses rely on your app to solve a problem is huge. You can also include metrics like a low churn rate (customers sticking with the service month over month) or specific usage stats (e.g., X number of projects created per week) to show depth of use.
Marketplace or On-Demand Service App: In a two-sided marketplace (like a buyers-and-sellers platform or a service matching app), traction often involves transaction volume and growth of the user base on both sides. For instance, imagine a marketplace app connecting freelance designers with clients. Early traction might be 100 client postings and 300 freelancer sign-ups in the first quarter, resulting in 50 successful jobs completed through the platform. If those numbers are steadily increasing each month (say 20% more jobs each month) and you see repeat usage (clients coming back to post more jobs, freelancers getting multiple gigs), that’s clear traction. Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) – the total dollar value of transactions through your platform – can also indicate traction; e.g., reaching $10,000 in GMV within a few months of launch shows real marketplace activity.
Mobile Game App: For a gaming app, downloads and active player metrics define traction. You might have 50,000 downloads in the first few weeks, but more importantly, 10,000 are active players every day. If players on average play 5 sessions a day and your Day-7 retention (percent of players still active a week after install) is, say, 25%, those are positive signals. Another traction point could be in-app purchases or ad revenue if your game is monetized that way – e.g., earning $1,000 in the first month from a subset of devoted players. This shows both engagement and a path to revenue.
Niche Utility App (e.g. a Health & Fitness app): Even for niche apps, you measure traction by user adoption and outcomes. A fitness app might have 5,000 users who have completed at least one workout in the app and an average of 3 workouts per week per active user. If you see that users are forming habits around your app (which is a big deal in health & fitness), that habit formation is traction. You could also include qualitative traction like user testimonials: e.g., dozens of users emailing to say your app helped them stick to a routine. That kind of engagement and satisfaction is a precursor to growth.
These examples are not one-size-fits-all benchmarks but rather illustrations of how early traction can manifest. The common thread is that traction is measurable evidence of user adoption and value creation. Whatever your key metrics are – be it user count, active usage, revenue, or engagement – start tracking them from the moment you launch your MVP. Show the trend line (e.g. 10 users this week, 20 next week, 40 the week after...). Investors love to see an upward trend, no matter how small the starting point.
Crucially, don’t compare your traction to someone else’s unfairly. A B2B app with five paying clients in 3 months might be doing great in its domain, whereas a free consumer app might need thousands of users to show traction. Focus on improving your own metrics week over week. Growth at any scale indicates you’re doing something right.
How BrainBox Apps Helps Founders Build MVPs and Gain Traction
Building an MVP and achieving traction sounds great in theory – but many founders wonder “How do I actually execute on this, especially if I’m not a developer?” This is where BrainBox Apps comes in. BrainBox Apps is a software development partner that helps founders launch web and mobile app ideas quickly and effectively. Our mission is to turn your idea into a real, user-ready product (MVP) so you can start generating traction as early as possible.
Here’s how BrainBox Apps supports you in focusing on traction first:
Rapid MVP Development: BrainBox Apps specializes in rapid development cycles. We know speed is critical for startups. Our team uses weekly sprints to prioritize the most important features and build your MVP as fast as possible without compromising quality. By getting a functional app in your hands quickly, we enable you to launch to real users and start the learning process early. You imagine it, we build it – right on time. This agility means you can seize market opportunities and outpace competitors who might still be stuck in development.
Expert Guidance on Core Features: One challenge founders face is deciding what to include in an MVP. You might have a grand vision with dozens of features, but not all are necessary in version 1.0. Our team at BrainBox Apps has years of experience (300+ apps built) across various industries, so we help you identify the core features that will deliver your app’s main value. We essentially validate your app idea alongside you – ensuring that the MVP is aligned with what your target users need most. This focus prevents wasted effort and keeps development lean and cost-effective.
High-Quality Product (Even as an MVP): Users today have high expectations, and a buggy or poorly designed app can ruin early traction. BrainBox Apps leverages a talented team of designers, developers, and QA specialists to deliver an MVP that’s stable, user-friendly, and visually appealing. A polished MVP helps you make a strong first impression on users, increasing the chance they’ll stick around. We follow best practices in UI/UX so that your early adopters enjoy using the app and give you positive feedback rather than complaints.
Support Beyond Coding – Launch & Marketing: Building the app is only part of the journey to traction. The next step is putting it in front of users. BrainBox Apps assists with app launch strategy as well. For example, we provide App Store Optimization (ASO) services and other app marketing support. This means when your app goes live on the App Store or Google Play (or on the web), it’s optimized to be discovered by your target audience. We also advise on initial marketing tactics – whether it’s leveraging social media, collecting emails from a landing page, or running small ad campaigns – to help you attract early users. Our goal is to make sure that once your MVP is ready, it actually reaches the people it’s intended for. After all, you can’t gain traction if users don’t know about your product.
Continuous Iteration and Support: Unlike a one-off development shop, BrainBox Apps strives to be a long-term partner in your startup’s growth. As you gain those first users, we remain available to help you iterate. Maybe user feedback indicates you need to tweak a feature or add a new one – we can jump back into development quickly. Perhaps your app needs to scale up because traction is building – we help ensure your backend and architecture can grow with demand. Essentially, we’re here to support your journey from MVP to product-market fit. Your success is our success, and we love helping startups navigate from that first prototype all the way to a thriving, traction-rich product.
BrainBox Apps has helped numerous founders launch their MVPs and even secure funding down the line, but only after laying the groundwork of a solid user base. We pride ourselves on not just writing code, but also understanding the startup mindset. We know you have to move fast, iterate, and focus on what matters: your users.
By partnering with us, you free yourself up to concentrate on customer development, marketing, and strategy, while we handle the technical heavy lifting. It’s a collaboration aimed squarely at one thing – getting your app in the hands of real users, sooner rather than later.
Conclusion: Traction First, Investors Later (The Right Order for Startup Success)
In the startup world, patience and focus pay off. Chasing investors before you’re ready is like trying to harvest fruit from a tree you only just planted. Instead, nurture the tree – water it, give it sunlight – and let it bear fruit in time. For a startup, that means nurturing your product and user base. Concentrate on building an app people love (even if it’s a small early audience). Gather testimonials, refine your features, and maybe earn a bit of revenue. This traction is the proof that de-risks your business and makes it attractive.
When you eventually walk into investor meetings, you won’t be just pitching a vision – you’ll be presenting evidence. That confidence and real-world validation will set you apart from the countless others who have only ideas and no users. Ironically, by the time you have strong traction, you might find that some investors are actually approaching you or that raising money becomes significantly easier. You might even get to choose the right investor partner rather than taking any deal you can find.
Let’s be clear: focusing on traction first doesn’t mean “don’t fundraise at all” – it means time your fundraising strategically. Build momentum, then use that momentum to fuel a successful raise. It’s about being prepared. As the saying goes, “Investors invest in lines, not dots” – they want to see growth over time, not just a one-time snapshot. So draw that line upward with your traction metrics before drawing too much attention from VCs.
Finally, remember that every great startup began small. Amazon’s first year, Jeff Bezos was packing books on his living room floor. Facebook started in one university. They focused on users and product, day by day, before the big checks rolled in. You can do the same. Stay encouraged by small wins – each new user, each positive comment, each iteration that improves your app. These are the building blocks of success.
Ready to focus on traction and need a hand with the tech side? BrainBox Apps is here to help you launch your MVP and start building real traction. Don’t put off your dream waiting for investors – let’s get your app out into the world now and prove its potential together.
👉 Contact BrainBox Apps today to discuss your idea and take the first step toward launching an MVP that turns your vision into a viable, traction-generating product. We’re excited to partner with founders like you and help construct your dream into reality. Stop chasing investors – build your product, delight your users, and the rest will follow!
