Key Terms
The Traction Canvas gives you a way to describe what you're doing, not just do it. Here's what each term means and how to put it to work — jump to any term, or scroll through from A to Z.
27-Stranger Rule
Your gut alone is worth about 8% confidence.
What: Talk to 27 total strangers — people who don’t already know you or know of you — about your problem, your ICP, and your pitch.
Why: At that count you can trust the pattern you’re hearing at about 90% confidence. Stop at the usual 3-5 conversations, and what you’re really hearing is your own optimism talking back to you, not the market.
How: Set a floor of at least 10 (ideally all 27) real strangers in your Initial Client Profile before you trust any conclusion, and ask each one for their perspective — not for a sale.
The 2-Point Disqualification Rule
The fastest way to close more deals is to stop chasing the wrong ones.
What: Once you have active prospects, stop investing time in anyone scoring 2 or more points below your current best active prospect.
Why: Every hour spent on a 5/10 is an hour not spent on a 7/10 — and the 7/10 is several times more likely to close, and to close at a better price.
How: Score your pipeline weekly, find your highest-scoring active prospect, subtract 2, and archive anything below that number — with a reminder to revisit if their score changes later.
The 2–3 Words — Your Marketing Moat
People don’t remember your brand name. They remember 2–3 words.
What: The short phrase customers use when describing you to a peer — the category you own in their memory, almost never your product name.
Why: Word of mouth runs on category, not brand. If you don’t own the search results for that phrase, your own word of mouth is sending traffic to someone else.
How: Ask every Won Sales Analysis customer how they’d describe you in 2–3 words to a peer. Find the phrase that repeats most across at least 5 customers, then buy the .com and every social handle for it immediately.
The 3 Forms of Competition
Your real competition is the status quo.
What: Every prospect already handles their problem somehow — through a Direct competitor, the Most Commonly Used alternative (often a spreadsheet), or the Most Expensive alternative.
Why: Most founders position only against direct competitors, who represent maybe 10% of lost deals. The other 90% are lost to "we’ll keep doing what we’re doing."
How: Name one direct competitor. Ask 5 customers what they do about this today — that’s your Most Commonly Used form. Find the most expensive way this problem gets solved, and focus every sales conversation on displacing form two or three.
The 5-Factor Disqualifying Matrix
Saying no is the hardest sales skill — and the most valuable.
What: A written scorecard rating every prospect 0–2 on five factors — Problem Urgency, Trigger Event, Decision Authority, Current Solution Dissatisfaction, and Resource Availability — for a maximum of 10.
Why: High-scoring prospects close faster, pay closer to list price, and refer more. Low scorers consume the same hours for a fraction of the revenue.
How: Score every prospect on all five factors before booking a second meeting. Set a threshold — 6/10 is a sensible default — and archive anything below it rather than pursuing it.
The 30% Inbound Threshold
Inbound is the only channel that gets cheaper as it scales.
What: The benchmark signalling readiness for marketing investment — 30% or more of new customers arriving inbound rather than through your own outreach.
Why: Below 30%, marketing spend just amplifies your own effort. Above 30%, the moat is doing real work — and that’s the thing worth pouring money into.
How: Record the source of every new customer at signup. Below 30% inbound, keep working Boxes 1–9 rather than spending on marketing. At 30%+, ask inbound customers how they found you and invest in that channel.
The ABC Model
Most prospects are comfortable doing nothing — until something changes.
What: A three-category system for naming the events that shift a prospect from comfortable to actively looking — Awareness (economics, risk, legal), Bad Experience (with people, product, or provider), and Change (in people, places, or priorities).
Why: Reaching a prospect after the first such event, but before they’ve defined the problem and designed a solution, makes you roughly 500% more likely to close.
How: List your last 5 closed deals. For each, ask what changed in that customer’s world in the 30–90 days before they started looking, and sort it into A, B, or C. The category that repeats most is the trigger to build your detection system around.
Analyze Wins, Not Losses
Losses tell you what to avoid. Wins tell you what to replicate.
What: A deliberate choice about where to point post-deal analysis — at the deals you won, not the ones you lost.
Why: Losses tell you what one prospect disliked, and everyone loses for a different reason, so there’s no pattern to find. Wins reveal the repeatable trigger, language, and decision path that actually produce revenue.
How: After every closed deal, log whether you won or lost — and if lost, move on. For every won deal, book a Won Sales Analysis call, and after three of them, look for the pattern across them.
AVI Framework
Aspirations, Values, Interests.
What: AVI stands for Aspirations, Values, and Interests — three categories of genuine common ground that build closeness with a prospect fast, without leaning on product expertise you may not have yet.
Why: You can’t outspend a bigger competitor on marketing, but you can out-relate them, and shared AVI is what turns a vendor relationship into a personal one.
How: Find and document at least 3 shared Aspirations, Values, or Interests with each active prospect — personal ones, not company facts.
The Competition Grid
Four ways different. One way cheaper. That is your position.
What: A one-page comparison showing four specific, verifiable differences between your solution and the Most Commonly Used alternative, plus proof your price sits below the Most Expensive one.
Why: "We’re better" is unfalsifiable and prospects discount it automatically. Four differences a sceptical prospect could check themselves in five minutes do not.
How: Put the alternative in column one, your solution in column two. Fill four rows with verifiable differences, add a fifth for price versus the most expensive option, and bring the grid to sales conversations instead of a feature list.
Displacement, Not Head-to-Head
The easiest competitor to beat is the one your customer forgets to compare you to.
What: A positioning discipline — win by being different from what people commonly use and cheaper than the most expensive alternative, not by out-featuring direct competitors.
Why: Prospects are rarely choosing between you and another startup. They’re choosing between you and continuing as they are, which carries zero switching cost and usually wins by default.
How: Open every discovery call by asking what they do about this today, and frame everything that follows against that answer. Only discuss direct competitors if the prospect raises them first.
Emotional Favourite
Being known when the trigger fires beats being qualified after the fact.
What: Proof — not a prediction — that a prospect has already contacted you first, ahead of every competitor, when something changed in their business.
Why: 74% of customers choose whoever brought value first. Arriving after someone else has earned that position means competing on price.
How: Document three shared Aspirations, Values, or Interests with each active prospect, and send one genuinely useful non-sales item every 30 days. Respond faster than anyone else they deal with.
Emotional Impact
People buy on emotion and justify with logic. Know the emotion first.
What: One of the seven components of a complete problem statement — the specific way the problem makes your ICP feel, captured in their own words.
Why: The decision to change is made emotionally and defended with logic afterward. Naming a prospect’s feeling before they’ve told you creates a level of being understood most vendors never reach.
How: Ask directly how the problem makes them feel, or what’s most frustrating about it. Write down their exact words, and after five interviews look for the feeling that repeats.
The "How Do You Do That?" Test
Say the impact so they ask "How do you do that?"
What: A pass/fail test for your Seven Second Sale — say it to five strangers and count how many respond with "How do you do that?" Three or more is a pass.
Why: That specific reaction is the only signal that proves someone recognised the problem and wants to know if you can fix it. "Interesting" and "sounds useful" are just politeness.
How: Say your Seven Second Sale to 5 prospects who’ve never heard of you. Count only the ones who say "How do you do that?" — not paraphrases. Fewer than 3? Change one variable and test again.
ICP — Initial Client Profile
Not Ideal Client Profile. Not Ideal Client Persona.
What: ICP stands for Initial Client Profile — the one specific person who will buy from you before you have any proof. The "Ideal" customer is actually the early majority, the wider market you only win after crossing the chasm.
Why: Confusing Initial with Ideal is why most startups pitch the right message to the wrong person too early.
How: Use three either/or bifurcation questions to split the whole market in half three times, and you’ll land on the 12.5% who are most motivated to buy right now.
Inbound Close Rate
A moat doesn’t just bring more leads — it brings better ones.
What: A comparison of the close rate of leads who found you against the close rate of leads you went out and found yourself.
Why: Inbound leads have already pre-qualified themselves before you ever spoke to them. If your moat is real, inbound should close meaningfully faster and more often than outbound.
How: Tag every new deal by source at intake — inbound or outbound — and track close rate separately for each group. If inbound isn’t closing higher, the moat isn’t reaching the right people yet.
Innovators & Early Adopters
The early majority won’t buy until someone else already has.
What: The first two groups on the adoption curve — the only people who buy on vision and their own judgement, before you have references or case studies.
Why: The early majority is usually who founders picture as their "ideal customer," but they structurally can’t say yes to an unproven company — they wait for proof you don’t have yet.
How: Look at your last 5–10 real prospects. Anyone who asked "who else uses this" before engaging is early majority or later. Anyone who said yes on the problem alone is your innovator or early adopter.
The Motivated Half
The narrower your ICP, the fatter your wallet.
What: At every split of your market, one half is usually bigger and the other is usually more motivated — further along, more in pain, faster to say yes.
Why: A founder with limited time and no track record converts a small motivated group far faster than a large indifferent one.
How: At each split, write down both halves and ask which one is already actively looking for a solution this month. Pick the more urgent half, even if it’s smaller, and repeat at the next split.
Multi-Threading the Account
Your champion can leave. Your relationships shouldn’t leave with them.
What: Three specific relationships to build at every active account — the person your main contact reports to, their likely replacement, and someone in a different department who benefits from your solution.
Why: Deals built on a single relationship die the moment that person leaves or stops responding — which happens more often than founders expect.
How: Ask your main contact who else would find this useful and who they report to. Have a genuine conversation with at least one of the other two people per active account.
Perspective, Not Pitch
The founder who listens closes more than the founder who presents.
What: The framing rule for validation interviews — you’re testing the direction you’re heading, not seeking feedback and not selling.
Why: The moment an interview feels like a pitch, the stranger turns polite — and polite answers are worthless.
How: State your assumption out loud and ask if it’s true for them. Then stop talking — silence is where the useful material arrives. Never describe your solution during the interview.
Problem Bingo™
3+ marks = painkiller. 1-2 = vitamin.
What: Problem Bingo is a 6-mark test — Urgent, Popular, Growing, Frequent, Mandatory, Expensive — for whether a startup problem is actually worth solving.
Why: Score 3 or more marks and you’ve found a painkiller worth building a company around; score 1-2 and you’ve found a vitamin nobody urgently needs.
How: List at least 3 candidate problems, score each one against all six marks, and build around the one that clears the bar — not the one you like best.
Quantifiable Implications
The cost of the problem must dwarf the cost of your solution — or the sale stalls.
What: The total measurable cost of the problem to your initial client profile — money lost, time wasted, and resources consumed, added into one number.
Why: In the LEARN phase you need 10x your price to cover the risk of being an unproven company; in EARN and SCALE, 5x is enough once references carry part of the load.
How: Ask the customer directly what the problem costs them per month — don’t answer for them. Add money, time, and resources into one total, then divide by your price to get your multiplier.
Raise the Bar
Your threshold isn’t fixed — the data tells you when to move it.
What: A discipline — track how fast your high-scoring prospects close compared to your low-scoring ones, and use that data to decide when to move your disqualification threshold.
Why: A threshold you set once and never touch just reflects your best guess from day one. As you close more deals, the data tells a truer story.
How: Log every closed deal’s original score and days to close. Every quarter, compare average close time by score band, and raise your threshold if a band is closing dramatically slower.
Seven Second Sale
aka the 7 Second Sale.
What: A Seven Second Sale is a one-sentence value proposition built on a takeaway verb — reduce, avoid, prevent — instead of a vitamin verb like improve or optimize, aimed at earning the word "How?" from a stranger within seven seconds.
Why: Buyers are 10X more likely to act on removing a pain than on gaining a benefit, so a takeaway-verb pitch produces real curiosity where a vitamin-verb pitch only produces polite interest.
How: Fill in "We help [ICP] [takeaway verb] [problem]," test it on 5 strangers, and count how many ask "How?"
Slingshotting
Going backwards a few steps so you can go forward faster.
What: Slingshotting means deliberately stepping back — to an earlier box, an earlier assumption, an earlier version of your pitch — instead of pushing forward from a position you already know is shaky.
Why: It’s the way out of the Traction Trap: staying the course because you don’t want to admit you were wrong means being right, not being successful — and those are not the same thing.
How: Trade a short step back for a much faster path forward: go back to the box or assumption you know is shaky, fix it, then move forward again.
Take-Away Verbs vs. Vitamin Verbs
People are 10x more likely to act when you take away pain than when you add a benefit.
What: Vitamin verbs add something — improve, optimize. Take-away verbs remove something — reduce, avoid, prevent, eliminate.
Why: Buyers are roughly 10x more likely to act on a take-away verb, because people work harder to avoid a loss than to secure an equivalent gain.
How: Write your current value proposition, circle the main verb, and if it’s a vitamin verb, replace it and rewrite the sentence around what disappears rather than what improves.
Traction Trap
Sometimes you have to believe even when you don't believe.
What: The Traction Trap is what happens once an idea sets a start-up’s direction and it takes flight — it becomes very hard to turn back, even when the direction is wrong.
Why: At some point you have to decide: do you want to be right and keep going on the path you’re on, or do you want to be rich and successful? Those aren’t always the same choice.
How: This is why slingshotting — going backwards a few steps so you can go forward faster — matters so much. If you want to be successful rather than just right, slingshotting is the way out.
Trigger Event Backwards Map
Every closed deal has a trigger. Most founders never find it.
What: The practice of tracing backwards from each closed deal to identify the specific event that started the customer looking, then sorting it into the ABC categories.
Why: Every deal has a trigger, but founders who don’t ask never see the pattern — so they keep prospecting on demographics instead of timing.
How: Open every Won Sales Analysis by asking what happened in their business in the 30–90 days before they started looking. Sort the answer into A, B, or C.
Trigger Event Detection System
Knowing which triggers to watch for is only half the answer.
What: The monitoring setup that tells you when a specific trigger fires for a specific prospect, turning a trigger list from knowledge into timing.
Why: Detecting a trigger within 48 hours makes you roughly 500% more likely to close than finding out a month later.
How: Set alerts combining your target industry with trigger keywords, follow target companies for job-change notifications, and log every detection with the date found and the date contacted.
True Strangers
Friends validate your enthusiasm. Strangers validate your idea.
What: The standard defining who counts toward your 27 validation interviews — someone who has never met you and never heard of you.
Why: Anyone who knows you carries social pressure to encourage you, which contaminates their answers.
How: Before every interview, ask "have we met?" and "have you come across my work?" A yes to either means it doesn’t count toward 27.
When They Ask "How?" — Don’t Answer
Ask for advice, you get money. Ask for money, you get advice.
What: The discipline of responding to "How?" with three discovery questions instead of explaining your solution.
Why: The moment you explain your solution, the prospect switches from feeling their problem to evaluating your product.
How: When they ask "How?", pause. Ask how big the problem is for them, how often it happens, and what they think causes it. Only then describe what you do.
Window of Dissatisfaction
aka the Dissatisfaction Zone, the Dissatisfaction Window, the Selling Window, the Zone of Dissatisfaction, the Window of Discontent, the Moment of Dissatisfaction, the Moment of Discontent, the Dissatisfaction Economy.
What: The Window of Dissatisfaction is the period after a decision maker realizes their current product or service no longer meets their needs, but before they’ve started shopping for alternatives.
Why: Reach a buyer inside that window and you’re roughly five times more likely to win the sale (74% vs. 16%) than if you reach them after they’ve already started shopping, when you’re just one more option.
How: Track named trigger events from the ABC Model and time your outreach to land inside the window, before a competitor gets there first.
Won Sales Analysis
aka Won Sale Analysis, Won Customer Analysis, Win Sales Analysis, Win-Loss Analysis, Win Analysis, Won-Lost Analysis.
What: A Won Sales Analysis is a structured interview, conducted within 72 hours of every closed deal, asking 5 post-close questions to find out what actually triggered the purchase and why the customer chose you.
Why: Losses tell you what to avoid; wins tell you what to replicate — skip this step and you’ll keep marketing the feature you think matters instead of the one your customers actually value.
How: Interview every closed deal within 72 hours, name the trigger event that preceded it, and feed the customer’s own words back into your Seven Second Sale.
More key terms get added here as the Traction Canvas grows. From The Traction Trap — Brandy Old and Craig Elias · HelpAStartupOut.com