Zero to Traction
Zero to Traction
Setting money on fire and looking busy doing it
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Setting money on fire and looking busy doing it

If your “progress” looks like a hiring spree, a logo refresh, and a launch party — without a single validated customer insight — you’re not scaling a company, you’re producing a very expensive play.
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Some founders raise money. Others raise blood pressure.

In this episode, JDM and Cam broadcast from a studio so fancy it practically screams “series B energy” — but don’t let the sound panels fool you.

This one’s all about pre-seed mistakes.

Specifically, the seductive trap of looking busy instead of learning. Think: new logos, onboarding flows, full-blown rebrands, and Product Hunt launches no one asked for.

To drive it home, they play a spicy round of Money or Momentum?, analyzing founder updates for real progress vs. very expensive wheel-spinning. If you’ve ever spent three weeks tweaking onboarding emails while your churn rate climbs, this one’s gonna sting (in a good way).

In This Episode

  • Why startup activity ≠ startup progress

  • How to increase your learning velocity and stop mistaking motion for movement

  • What “time to customer” really means—and why founders waste too much of it

  • The psychological cost of progressivity (aka productivity theater’s craftier cousin)

  • Why feature creep is not validation, and neither is your fourth Product Hunt launch

Frivolous Thoughts

  • Zero to Traction was featured as a “hidden gem” in the Entrepreneurship newsletter of podcast.today, and JDM & Cam debate whether it counts as validation — or just vibes.

  • Cam rocks a shirt with a blue-footed booby and shares a shockingly relevant fun fact: the emu and kangaroo are on Australia’s crest because neither can walk backward. A metaphor, perhaps?

  • JDM revisits Black Sabbath in honor of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing, only to discover that 1970s heavy metal now sounds… quaint.

  • Bonus round: The duo dubs themselves the “Ted Lasso and Foul-Mouthed Teddy Bear” of startup strategy.

Sponsor: The Urban Hive

A massive thanks to this episode’s sponsor: The Urban Hive.

Brandon and Molly were kind enough to let us beta test their new studios before they officially launch later this summer,

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