your position on the canvas · red → green
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Word of mouth is your most powerful channel — make it happen, don’t hope it happens.
”Master this box and referrals route straight to you — word of mouth beats all advertising combined by 200%.
Work top to bottom:Start→Do the work→You’re ready
START HERE
Think WOM not SEO.
Word of mouth outperforms paid marketing by 2× — and only 7% of it happens online. The other 93% is real conversations you never see and can’t control. What you can control is the 2–3 words people use to describe you — and whether they’re worth repeating. Most founders don’t; they build a good product and hope people talk. Hope isn’t a system.
→ When your happiest customer describes you to a friend, do they use the same 2–3 words every time — the words you’d choose?
THE THREE BIGGEST MISTAKES
SKIP
You skip the playbook — don’t document your sales patterns — so your next hire starts from scratch.
SHORTCUT
You assume customers remember your brand name instead of the 2–3 words they actually use, and competitors grab that category.
STUMBLE
You start marketing before sales is proven, scaling a broken process and burning cash.
DO THE WORK
Own your 2–3 word moat.
When a happy customer says “try the restaurant scheduling app,” that friend types those exact words into Google or an AI assistant. Own the phrase — the .com and the handles — and the referral routes straight to you; your competitor can’t intercept it.
When they hear of you…
they search here
Google
They Google your name…
…or ask their favourite AI:
ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Perplexity
Grok
Grok
→
…and find you here
1 → 1,000: prove the sale, own the .com & handles, document the playbook, layer in paid to amplify — and word of mouth compounds into a locked moat.
“One day to buy. A multi-year moat. Learn before you earn.”
YOU’RE READY
You own the words your customers use — and word of mouth compounds into a moat.
When the 2–3 words are yours, the Traction Canvas is complete — run it again on your next product line.