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The Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction
What real founders learned when things finally started to click.
The early startup grind is a mind game. You’ve got a product, a few users, and a spreadsheet full of numbers that don’t yet mean much. You’re staring at your dashboard thinking: Is this traction or just noise?
The truth? Most early signals don’t show up in your metrics. They show up in people — customers, competitors, even you.
We pulled together the most surprising early traction cues founders actually experienced — the ones you usually only recognize in hindsight. If you’re in the trenches, here’s what to look for.
1. Your Customers Start Complaining
It sounds bad, but silence is worse. Criticism means they care enough to want your product to be better.
GOAT’s CEO, Eddy Lu, found that out the hard way. When a promo crashed his site and thousands of sneakerheads lit him up on social media, it was painful — but it also proved real demand existed. “At our stage, it’s better to be hated than unknown,” he said.
Gong’s co-founder Eilon Reshef had a similar experience: beta users got angry when Gong didn’t record certain calls. That frustration was the giveaway — users were already relying on it like oxygen. All 12 early design partners converted into paying customers.
If people are yelling, they’re hooked. If they’re quiet, they’re gone.
2. Strangers Start Saying Yes
Early validation from friends is meaningless. They say “sure” out of loyalty. The real test is whether total strangers care.
Ryan Glasgow, founder of Sprig, ditched his warm network and started cold-emailing founders and PMs. “If I’m solving a real problem,” he said, “they’ll give me their time.” They did. That was his first proof of product-market pull.
When cold outreach works, you’ve crossed the line from “interesting idea” to “needed solution.”
3. Customers Won’t Stop Asking for Features
It’s tempting to see endless feature requests as chaos. But as Clay’s CEO Kareem Amin realized, it’s actually the best kind of chaos — people are using your product enough to want more from it.
When users flag bugs or demand improvements immediately, it means they’ve mentally adopted you. You’re part of their workflow now.
Notion gives you the workspace your startup deserves — docs, tasks, product roadmaps, team wikis, and investor updates in one clean space.
For a limited time, early-stage startups get 6 months of Notion Premium free. No credit card. No catch.
4. You Catch People Using It in the Wild
Seeing your logo in a customer’s browser hits different.
For Airtable’sAndrew Ofstad, it happened at WeWork. He looked around the office — Airtable was open on every screen. “Oh my god,” he thought, “people actually use this.” That’s the moment it stops being a startup and starts being infrastructure.
5. They’re Buying the Idea, Not the Product
Lattice had people paying annual contracts before a working demo existed. Vanta got inbound emails from a barebones homepage. When users line up without seeing the product, you’ve found a pain so real they’re buying the promise.
That’s not luck — that’s traction.
6. Your Name Starts Circulating
When people start referring to your company by name — not your name — you’re on the map. Shippo’sLaura Behrens Wu said it best: “When others start using your startup’s name in conversation, it suddenly feels real.”
7. Smart People Are Building the Same Thing
When top-tier engineers and competitors start chasing the same idea, it’s validation, not threat.
Vercel’sGuillermo Rauch noticed top devs at Redfin and Trulia were independently building versions of Next.js. “That’s when I knew this was needed,” he said. Great minds don’t copy — they converge.
8. You Can Finally Breathe (a Little)
Retool’sDavid Hsu described PMF like this: “It’s rolling a stone up a hill — and realizing one day it’s not rolling back down.”
You won’t feel a ‘geyser moment.’ You’ll just notice your anxiety fading. Customers keep coming, feedback gets sharper, and the hill starts to flatten.
9. You’re Your Own Best Customer
When you start using your own product religiously — and it surprises you — that’s a sign.
Pilot’s team caught double payments in their own books using Pilot. Webflow’s founders watched a co-founder build a full site in minutes using their own tool. They didn’t need a focus group to know: this was game-changing.
10. You Feel It
Productboard’sHubert Palan literally charted his mood three times a day to track progress. His takeaway: founder happiness correlated directly with customer satisfaction. When the feedback turned consistently positive, so did his chart.
When things start working, you’ll know — not from your dashboard, but from your gut.
Bottom line:
Early traction doesn’t look like hockey-stick charts. It looks like messy signals — complaints, cold replies, spontaneous feature requests, product obsession, and the moment you catch someone using what you built when you weren’t looking.
That’s when it’s working. Even if you can’t quite prove it yet
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