“What Kind of Traction Do You Have?” Deciphered

When I ask, “what kind of traction do you have,” that’s short for a larger set of questions. Here’s what I’m really asking. (More about the picture below in a moment.)

• Is your product/web site in market? If not, how long till it is? What does it take to get there in terms of people, time, and money?
• Do users come to your site or is your traffic really part of someone else’s site? Are you a destination, a widget, or a hybrid?
• What are your stats?
  What’s the split in your traffic between paid and organic?
  What’s the month over month growth?
  How many uniques per month?
  How many impressions?
  How many registered users? Active users?
  What kind of online marketing do you do (SEO? Paid ads? Nothing?)
  Relative to your competitors, how are you doing?
  What’s the domestic/international split in traffic?
• Are you a sticky site or a transaction site? Do you try to get users to come back over and over or do you try to complete a one-time transaction?
• What does success look like for you? If you’re about driving page views, what’s your goal this year, order of magnitude. 10M/Mo.? 100M/Mo.? 1B/Mo? 1B/Day?
• If you’re thinking about or currently monetizing your site, what form does that take? If advertising, what kind of RPMs? If other forms of monetization, what are they?
• What’s your strategy for growing the business? (This can be simple – get users to refer their friends… keep doing no marketing… etc.)

In case you’re wondering… that’s a 1910 traction engine, which according to wikipedia is “a wheeled steam engine used to move heavy loads, plough ground or to provide power at a chosen location…. Traction engines tend to be large, robust, and powerful, but extremely heavy, slow and poorly maneuverable.”

That sounds pretty apt… except for the last part of course!