I wanted to get traction but seemed like I can only do that once I get into an accelerator but when I talked to accelerators, everyone of them said no because (get this) - no traction (Are you serious!)
This is a really serious deadlock that every new founder goes through and it's very difficult to get out of.
Here’s how I was able to hack around this:
Some myths I had:
Accelerators will give me customers. They actually won’t. The best thing they do is give money + give you network. The latter means that I can cold email someone saying - “I’m part of XYZ accelerator” and I will have a higher chance of a reply.
I always assumed traction looks like monthly recurring revenue. MRR is super hard to get and also RETAIN. You could have 10 early customers today. At $10/mo that’s $100MRR. Minimum respectable MRR is ~5K/mo.
Once I learned the above two things, here’s what I did:
Instead of trying to get into big accelerators, I started off by joining smaller founder communities like LOI (Canada), OnDeck, Mercury Raise. They give you enough perks, network, traction to start building up momentum.
Switched to delivering services over software. Instead of selling an SEO software for $200/mo, I delivered outcome based services instead for $2K/mo. Within 3 months, I was at $10K MRR. If I had continued doing software, it would have taken many more months to ever get close to that number.
By doing this, I was able to build up a convincing traction story about what I was doing today and how could scale further down the road (i.e. switching to pure product)
Hope this helps you get out of the loop!
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