Traction Lab Podcast

Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern: founder has an idea, founder needs a product, product needs money, so the next three months disappear into pitch deck purgatory. Very official. Very polished. Still just unfundable assumptions with pretty slides. This week, Cameron and JDM continue the Startup Pseudoscience Series with one of the more seductive founder myths: you need to raise money to get star...

Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern: you launch a thing, people say they are interested, and when it is time to show up… no one does. Cool, data, I guess? This week, Cameron and JDM record from Science and Startups Live, which was supposed to be a small in-person podcast event and instead became a very public lesson in failure. Fifteen registrations. One attendee. Several empty chairs with excelle...

Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern: founder has a big idea, founder protects the idea, founder keeps polishing the idea until it becomes too precious to test. It feels productive. It also feels safe. Which is exactly the problem. This week, Cameron and JDM kick off the Startup Pseudoscience Series by taking aim at one of the most comforting founder myths: that the great idea is the hardest part....

Hey friends 👋 “AI native” is everywhere right now—and almost nobody using the label actually qualifies. This week, Cameron and JDM dig into what it actually means to build with AI at the core of your startup (it’s not about your workflow tools), and why the founders most excited about shipping fast are making the same old mistake in a shiny new wrapper. There’s a meaningful difference between AI...

Hey friends 👋 There’s a moment every founder hits — you’re maxed out, you hate doing the thing, so you hire someone to take it off your plate. VP of Sales. Head of Product. Done. Problem solved. Except it’s not. Not even close. This week, Cameron and JDM break down the Founder Arc — the path from founder-only to founder-led to founderless — and why jumping straight from one end to the other is ho...

Hey friends 👋 Every founder wants the J-curve — up and to the right, forever. But that chart has a boring flat part at the beginning that most founders try to skip. That’s the part where you figure out what actually works, prove it can happen again, and then pour gas on it. Skip it and you’re not scaling a growth engine. You’re just spending money faster. This week we dig into one of our core fra...

Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern. * January: idea. * February: market research. * March: wireframes, logo, landing page. * April: four customer convos. Two said routing is a pain point. Ouch — that’s just a museum of artifacts nobody bought a ticket to. This week, we break down Time to Customer : the single most important velocity metric for early-stage founders, and the one most likely to make...

Hey friends 👋 Here’s what a pivot is not : changing your messaging, tweaking your pricing, or trying a new ad channel. It’s also not torching the company and starting over. A pivot is what happens when data invalidates a core assumption — and there are really only three categories worth changing: your audience, your product, or how you distribute and capture value. That’s the framework this week....

Hey friends 👋 You’ve got 22 prospects in the pipeline. Eight firms said they’ll start after tax season. Five want a follow-up next quarter. Three need a case study first. And you’re feeling really good about it. You shouldn’t. “Sounds great” isn’t a yes — it’s a soft no with a future date attached. The say-do gap is real, and most founders are snorting hopium instead of closing it. This week, Cam...

Hey friends 👋 Six paying customers. $4,800 MRR. The founder already knows which two to discount. Same evidence. Cameron gives it an 8. JDM gives it a 6. That’s the conversation the Strength of Evidence Matrix is built for. This week, we dig into the Strength of Evidence Matrix — one of the core Traction Lab tools. It evaluates your traction on two axes: how robust is the signal (from interest to...

Hey friends 👋 You’ve had the good conversations. Coffee chats that ended with “this is really interesting.” Followers who DM you to say they can’t wait. And when you go to investors, they pass. Because interest and evidence are two completely different things. This week, JDM and Cameron are joined by Nikki Sims — operator, VC fund veteran, and someone who’s actually seen what happens when founder...

Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern — founder shows up with a deck, flips to the TAM slide, and there it is: $53 billion… $67 billion… any enormous number with a B at the end. And everyone in the room nods like it means something. It usually doesn’t. This week JDM goes solo (Cameron’s out representing the ecosystem and cheering at a pitch competition — we’ll forgive him) to dig into one of his all...

Hey friends 👋 You’ve seen the email before: Subject: “Huge month!!” Body: 10,000 users, engagement through the roof, three new features shipped, featured in a newsletter. No revenue. No retention breakdown. No ask. And somehow, you think that’s an investor update. This week, JDM and Cameron break down what investor updates are actually for — and why the founders sending the flashiest ones are oft...

Hey friends 👋 You’ve got 43 customers using your product for free, a pilot converting at 4 out of 11, and a franchisor who just announced they’re building your product themselves—for free. This week’s office hours was a live collision of founders at very different stages, all running into the same underlying problem: they’re optimizing for the wrong thing at the wrong time. JDM and Cameron tackle...

Hey friends 👋 You have the domain expertise. You have the product. You might have even used AI to vibe-code the whole thing in a weekend. But here’s where most technical founders hit a wall — not because the product is wrong, but because getting your first paying customer is a completely different skill set than building the thing. And it’s harder than it looks. This week, we dig into Tech Timmy...

Hey friends 👋 You’ve heard the feedback. You nodded along. You maybe even wrote some of it down. But are you actually listening — or are you running it through a filter that was already biased toward your conclusion? This week, we got nerdy about the cognitive machinery that causes smart founders to ignore the data right in front of them: confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and cognitive diss...

Hey friends 👋 Welcome to our weekly AMA! Every Friday, we go live on YouTube and LinkedIn to answer real questions from founders at every stage. We’re now adding that to this podcast feed every Wednesday so you can catch it wherever you listen. This week, we dug into four questions that each hit a different flavor of the same core problem: are you solving the right job for the right person? When...

Hey friends 👋 Minimum Viable Product. Three words every founder knows, and almost nobody uses correctly. The “V” isn’t about whether the product exists—it’s about whether you can capture value back. Whether the market will actually pay. Whether you’re testing the riskiest assumption sitting between you and a working business model. Build without that framing, and you’re just... building. Optimizi...

Hey friends 👋 You’ve been there. The pitch goes well, the partner’s engaged, and then she says something like “we’d love to see stronger net retention before moving forward.” So you spend the next two months building a cohort analysis dashboard. You come back. She says something different. You’re still not funded—and now you’re behind. Investor feedback isn’t always what it looks like. Sometimes...

Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern: solid revenue, happy customers, no churn. Everything looks like it’s working. So you go to raise money to hire sales reps and scale — and investors pass. They say “we want to see more traction,” and you nod like you understand, then go burn more of your network to get more of the same sales that got you here. The cycle repeats. The problem isn’t your product. I...

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it. “Nobody’s doing this.” It feels like confidence. It sounds like vision. To every investor and advisor in the room, it’s a 🚩 so bright it practically glows. This week, JDM and Cameron break down why “we have no competitors” is almost always wrong — and what founders are usually trying to say when they use it. There are shadow competitors (hint: spreadsheets c...

🚨 NEW: Cameron and I are super happy to be launching the Traction Lab Venture School, a new program to help founders of early-stage startups find paying customers. Kicks off March 23rd. Only 20 spots. You in? Hey friends 👋 It’s almost a cliché. Some VC tells you to “go bigger” on your fundraise, another investor says to keep it small, and you’re stuck in the middle. So in this episode, we tackle...

🚨 NEW: Cameron and I are super happy to be launching the Traction Lab Venture School, a new program to help founders of early-stage startups find paying customers. Our first cohort kicks off on March 23rd, and spots are limited. Learn more → Hey friends 👋 Ever had a big enterprise prospect come knocking and suddenly your entire startup strategy is up for debate? Yeah, we see this all the time… S...

Hey friends 👋 We’re coming up on 75 episodes (yes, we’re calling that a win), and this week we’re tackling the decision every founder faces: should you pivot, persevere, or pack it in? It’s easy to confuse “hasn’t worked yet” with “never going to work.” But the difference between those two things is where smart founders separate themselves from the pack. We break down the evidence-based framework...

Hey friends 👋 This week we’re tackling one of the hairiest questions in early-stage startups: when do you stop doing everything yourself? JDM’s calling in from 30,000 feet (but not really), and we dove deep into the psychology behind premature delegation. You know the pattern: founder gets scared of sales calls, hires a “head of sales” at 28 customers, then wonders why growth stalls. We break dow...