Jump to any box · red → green
Traction Canvas
Box 1 — Problems
Find a problem big enough that people want to become your customers now, NOT later.
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Box 2 — Bifurcation
Three questions that help you find the 12.5% of the market most likely to become your customer.
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Box 3 — Competition
How to differentiate yourself from the three forms of competition every startup has.
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Box 4 — Seven Second Sale
How to create almost instant interest in any product or service.
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Box 5 — Enrolling
How to get meetings with your ICP before you build anything related to your product.
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Box 6 — Trigger Events
How to get in front of motivated decision-makers when they're 5× more likely to become your customer.
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Box 7 — Disqualifying
How to score and disqualify sales opportunities so you only pursue the ones most likely to close.
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Box 8 — Emotional Favourite
How to become the preferred person to do business with, so they call you first when they're ready to buy.
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Box 9 — Won Sales Analysis
How to find and replicate your biggest and best wins.
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Box 10 — Marketing Moat
Own the domain names and social handles for the 2–3 word phrase your customers use to describe you.
Click to explore →

The Traction Canvas™ is a one-page sales playbook co-created by Brandy Old and Craig Elias.

It leverages over 35 years of sales and startup experience to demystify how early-stage companies capture their first customers and cross the technology chasm. Since teaming up, they have helped hundreds of early-stage companies globally de-risk their businesses, perfect their pitches, capture customers, and attract investors.

Why do Startups Fail?

Most startups don’t fail because of bad products. 

They fail because founders try to skip critical steps in a rush to sell the ‘Early Majority’ – the 33% of the market on the far side of the chasm in Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Curve.

To do that, they try to sell to everyone, use add-on language, pitch features before asking questions, and don’t talk to enough total strangers.

The Traction Canvas fixes that with 10 boxes in three key sections, in the exact order they are to be completed:

  • LEARN (Boxes 1–5): Founder-led outbound to strangers — 10x the customers you get from selling to your network. Work through Problems, Bifurcation, Competition, Seven Second Sale, and Enrolling before anything else.
  • EARN (Boxes 6–9): Founder involved – 10x the LEARN zone again by reaching the right people at the right moment. Master Trigger Events, Disqualifying, Emotional Favourite, and Won Sales Analysis.
  • SCALE (Box 10): Inbound – Marketing Moat — 10x one more time by being more findable when word of mouth happens by owning the digital real estate for the 2–3 word combinations people use when they tell others about you.

Each zone multiplies the last: 10x → 100x → 1,000x. The mantra is “Learn before you earn.”

Get the Canvas →

3 ways founders blow the canvas

Skip
You skip the canvas and jump straight to building or marketing, working off assumptions instead of a defined market.
Shortcut
You fill in the boxes once from your gut and never test them against real customers, so the whole canvas is built on false confidence.
Stumble
You complete the canvas but treat it as a one-time exercise and never revisit it as you learn, so it goes stale and your go-to-market drifts.

→ Work through it with us — Brandy and Craig run the Traction Canvas live with founder cohorts and accelerators, and complete it 1:1 with funded teams. Work with us →

→ Start with Box 1 — Problems — the first box unlocks everything that follows. Start Box 1 →

→ Get the free toolkit below — the fillable canvas, session slides, a one-hour recording, and the Traction Playbook maker.

Get the full Traction Canvas toolkit — free.

Fillable PDF template · Session slides · One-hour recording · Traction Playbook maker

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