If you’re in the Traction Gap, building more features won’t save you. What you need is a foothold. That emotional, intellectual, and strategic “purchase” that gets people leaning in before they sign on.
Most startups don’t fail because they built the wrong thing. They fail because they built the right thing, and nobody noticed.
Welcome to the Traction Gap, the no-man’s land between your first product releases and meaningful market momentum. Bruce Cleveland coined the term to describe the dangerous space between MVP and scalable revenue, where too many startups get stuck and burn through time, money, talent, and/or all three.
And the biggest reason they don’t make it? They tried to sell before they got purchase.
What’s the Traction Gap? You’ve shipped. You’ve hired. You’ve maybe even raised. But the market isn’t biting. Growth is tepid, leads are soft, your CAC makes VCs wince…your product-led growth strategy is not product-leading to growth.
Ironically, it’s not a product problem. It’s not even (always) a sales problem.
It’s a market engineering problem, as Cleveland calls it. Most early-stage teams focus on building the thing. But few spend time building the market conditions necessary for that thing to break through, create awareness, and establish differentiation.
It’s almost impossible to both create and harvest demand at the same time. Human brains don’t work that fast. You have to do the advance work.
Market Engineering: The Work Before the Work
Market engineering is how you create context and conditions for your product to exist, in a way that feels intuitive and obvious in retrospect. It’s the story you tell and sell the market so they pay attention. It’s the signals you send so they believe. It’s the traction you generate before recurring revenue becomes reality. You can’t skip this part. Not if you want to cross the gap.
And that’s where category strategy comes in.
Category Strategy = Narrative Resonance
Category strategy is a system for context and meaning-making in the market. It shifts the conversation from “why us” to “why this,” which is infinitely easier to sell. It tells people:
* What you are
* Why you matter
* And why the world needs you right now
Here’s how:
* Clarify and Promote the Problem - If you don’t own the problem, you don’t own the market. Category strategy helps you frame the problem in a way that makes your solution inevitable.
* Create Differentiation That Matters - Existing conventions and context leads to “better” is weak. Showing you’re different wins. Especially when you invent or redefine the playing field.
* Align Your Whole Go-To-Market Motion - One narrative, used by product, sales, marketing, and execs, equals speed, clarity, and compounding effects.
* Signal Vision and Leadership - Great category strategy acts like a magnet. It attracts believers—customers, talent, and capital alike.
Who’s Done It Right?
* Gainsight made “Customer Success” a category, not just a department.
* HubSpot evangelized “Inbound Marketing” before selling software.
* Drift sold “Conversational Marketing” while competitors were still talking about chatbots.* (There's an entire chapter to be written on the perils of PE as it relates to category strategy)
They all named the game before they asked anyone to play.
When to Start You don’t need Series B funding or a 30-page manifesto to do this. You need:
* A clear POV on your audience’s problem
* A new lens on how to think about that problem
* A narrative that scales across your team
* Category components to provide the scaffolding to build the idea upon.
Then, test it. Say it out loud. Ship it in your deck, your homepage, your next investor call.
If you’re in the Traction Gap, building more features won’t save you. What you need is a foothold. That emotional, intellectual, and strategic “purchase” that gets people leaning in before they sign on.
Get purchase before anyone buys.
That’s how you cross the gap.
Ultimately, the most valuable real estate is not a crowded marketplace, but the uncharted territory just beyond its boundaries. True innovation doesn't compete within existing categories—it renders them irrelevant.
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