You demonstrate traction not by building out a solution, but through the use of a proxy for your solution—something I call an “offer.” An offer is made up of three things: your unique value proposition, a demo, and pricing.

Facebook achieved its goal of building the largest social network not by pursuing a land-grab strategy like its competitors but rather by following a carefully orchestrated staged rollout strategy. Even though it wasn’t first and didn’t start with an inherent unfair advantage,

Rather than measuring the number of interviews or quality of interviews, focus instead on the macro goal of creating a customer (or as close to one as possible). While learning is a key activity, it’s the results that matter. The way you do this during the Problem/Solution Fit stage is through your offer. Your prospects either accept or reject your

Attention isn’t the only kind of derivative currency. Another example is data. You might give away a free mobile fitness app to your users and aggregate their usage data into something more valuable that an insurance company, for instance, may want to purchase.

The problem with relying on revenue as a measure of progress is that revenue is generally a longer customer life-cycle event, which can mean having to fly blind for a really long time.

Joe’s story is not atypical. Most entrepreneurs price their products like artists. They struggle to place a fair value on their product and fall back on a cost-based pricing approach like Joe did. A more effective approach is thinking in terms of value-based pricing in which you anchor your pricing not against your cost structure but against the po

1. A Unique Value Proposition This represents the finished story benefit or promise that you make to your customers to get their attention. If you were building a job-hunting site, for example, rather than rattling off your unique features, focus on what job seekers want: “Get a dream job in sixty days.”

Goldratt describes as the goal: The universal goal of every business is to increase throughput while minimizing inventory and operating expenses provided doing that doesn’t degrade throughput.

Based on working with hundreds of entrepreneurs across a diverse range of products, I have found that the average time to go from idea to Problem/Solution Fit is eight weeks. Remember that at this stage, you don’t build a product, but an offer, which allows for rapid validation. That said, the single biggest contributors to how long Problem/Solutio