Traction and Growth: Sports Fan Apps

Thefreedictionary.com defines traction as the following:

The act of drawing or pulling, especially the drawing of a vehicle or load over a surface by motor power.

Adhesive friction, as of a wheel on a track or a tire on a road

What is traction in a startup? When building a startup it’s essential to achieve traction. I define traction simply as getting a certain number of paying customers over a period of time. Obviously each industry can’t define traction as such, e.g. Facebook doesn’t have paying customers. But as a founder, you must know how to define traction for your business. In short, I think that you can say that you have traction when you’ve proven your business model.

I believe that Reflect7 has finally seen some traction. This last week was the opening weekend for NCAA football. If you didn’t already know, Reflect7 creates iPhone apps for sports fans.

Here are our daily sales at this time last year:

Approximately a whopping \$195.

Here are our daily sales for the opening weekend this year:

Approximately \$2500, a 12.5x growth! Now granted we do have more apps in the store this year then we did last year. But the most popular apps are still seeing much more downloads then they did last year. It’s a good thing we didn’t quit.

We’re slowly expanding into the Android and the Blackberry… so who knows where the following year will take us! But the important point is that you need to achieve traction and growth, if you’re not… you may want to consider to pivot or change business models.

Gabriel Wienberg has a list of creative ways businesses used to achieved traction: Traction Verticals

Follow me on Twitter: @jprichardson

-JP

If you made it this far, you should follow me on Twitter. Follow @jprichardson

-JP