You need an accelerator to get traction, you need traction to get into an accelerator

I wanted to get traction but seemed like I can only do that once I get into an accelerator but when I talked to accelerators, everyone of them said no because (get this) - no traction (Are you serious!)

This is a really serious deadlock that every new founder goes through and it's very difficult to get out of.

Here’s how I was able to hack around this:

Some myths I had:

• Accelerators will give me customers. They actually won’t. The best thing they do is give money + give you network. The latter means that I can cold email someone saying - “I’m part of XYZ accelerator” and I will have a higher chance of a reply.

• I always assumed traction looks like monthly recurring revenue. MRR is super hard to get and also RETAIN. You could have 10 early customers today. At $10/mo that’s $100MRR. Minimum respectable MRR is ~5K/mo.

Once I learned the above two things, here’s what I did:

• Instead of trying to get into big accelerators, I started off by joining smaller founder communities like LOI (Canada), OnDeck, Mercury Raise. They give you enough perks, network, traction to start building up momentum.

• Switched to delivering services over software. Instead of selling an SEO software for $200/mo, I delivered outcome based services instead for $2K/mo. Within 3 months, I was at $10K MRR. If I had continued doing software, it would have taken many more months to ever get close to that number.

By doing this, I was able to build up a convincing traction story about what I was doing today and how could scale further down the road (i.e. switching to pure product)

Hope this helps you get out of the loop!