Traction is quantitative evidence of 📝Market Demand — measurable, ideally accelerating proof that people want what a company is building.
What counts as traction depends on stage. Before revenue it looks like signups, activation, engagement depth, and retention cohorts. After revenue it looks like growth rate, net retention, payback period, and expansion within existing accounts. The requirement common to every stage is that the metric be hard to fake and anchored in voluntary behavior: someone chose to come back, or chose to pay.
The distinction that does the most work is between traction and activity. Incorporating, hiring, shipping features, signing partnerships, and closing a round are all progress, and none of them are traction — they measure effort and access, not demand. Investors treat traction as the only available evidence that 📝Market Adoption is actually underway rather than merely hypothesized, which is precisely why founders under pressure reach for numbers that rise without meaning anything.
Retention is the hardest of these to manufacture. Growth can be bought and a launch spike can be engineered, but a cohort curve that flattens instead of decaying is close to the only honest signal in the set.