It’s easy to tell yourself things are working in the early stages of a business.
You push hard, things move, users show up, the dashboard looks alive, and it all feels like proof you’re getting somewhere.
That’s where founders start lying to themselves. Not because the numbers are fake, but because they are reading the wrong ones.
You can end up building confidence off the wrong signals and run the business into the ground without realising it until much later.
That’s why I invited Ilias Hatzis | Entrepreneur to write this. He’s the founder of Inkjin, Europe’s tattoo marketplace, and has built startups across adtech and crypto.
What he gets into here is one of the easiest traps founders fall into early: mistaking movement for traction. 👇🏻
You have movement, not traction
The dashboard can look healthy and still tell you the wrong story. I’ve had to learn that for myself more than once.
Signups keep going up. Engagement is “solid.” Retention is just good enough to keep you optimistic. So you proceed: extend the roadmap, hire the next team member, raise the next round of funding. Three months later, growth has stalled, your burn is up, and you still feel no more certain.
The data wasn’t broken. The problem was what you thought it meant.
Motion can look like traction
Most startup dashboards are built around activity: who came, how long they stayed, how often they came back. A user can look, like, and come back, but still not be committed to you. This isn’t traction, it’s a warmup.
This gets worse when a startup has early momentum. Your first users came through word of mouth, a well-placed tweet, or your own relentless and very personal efforts to drag potential customers through every barrier the product had to offer.
That momentum is real, and it matters. But it’s also borrowed: from your marketing, your distribution, and your own effort as a founder. It only lasts as long as you keep pushing it.
The dashboard can be distracting because it never asks the harder question: Does anyone care enough about this product to make a serious investment in it?
The signal you actually want
Users will write to you to complain that the product is broken. They’ll ask for features that remove friction from their daily lives.
When something doesn’t work, they work around it instead of leaving. They email after you go quiet. They keep using it while they wait for a response.
The better metric is inconvenience. Would users be truly inconvenienced if you disappeared from their lives today? Not annoyed. Inconvenienced.
We misread our own product
Inkjin, our startup, helped users discover and connect directly with tattoo artists. We had very solid retention numbers. Users were spending a lot of time in the app, coming back repeatedly, looking through tattoo designs and artist bios.
They were doing what they needed to do, but the real decision-making was happening beyond the app: contacting artists, discussing designs, making final agreements.
Inkjin was helping people get there, but it hadn’t become the owner of commitment. The dashboard measured consideration at scale. It could not measure where the decision was made.
The harder signal came from artist feedback. When we asked artists who had contacted them and who had actually gone on to get tattooed, the answer was clear: we estimated that 20 to 30 monthly bookings were coming from Inkjin discovery and being completed outside Inkjin. The decisions were being made. We just weren’t tracking them.
So we changed our stance. We stripped down the dashboard. We stopped asking how many people were using it. We started asking who made a significant decision, who zeroed in on an artist and committed to an action, and who came back to that same decision two or three times. We changed how we tracked what counted.
The real traction test
Look at the past 30 days and, without hand-waving, answer three questions:
Who actually acted on purchase intent?
Who returned to the same decision a few times?
Who could not do it without you?
If you can’t answer those clearly, that’s the signal. You aren’t measuring traction. You’re measuring motion. I run this test on our own product, and it makes me uncomfortable every single time.
If a company you’re evaluating cites daily active users, time on site, signups, a growing waitlist, or media mentions, you’re looking at motion.
Ask instead: who is dependent on this? Who gets upset when it breaks? What do users do tomorrow if this disappears?
If the answers are vague, the traction is borrowed. If the answers are specific, with named users or a concrete alternative, you’re getting closer to something real.
What this mistake costs
Founders who mistake motion for traction start making expensive decisions too early.
They add headcount, stretch the roadmap, and spend money as if demand is already there. It isn’t. The product still has attention, activity, and maybe even growth. What it doesn’t have yet is enough commitment to support those decisions.
Then the story turns defensive. “We had users but they didn’t convert. We just need more time. It’s a little early.” By then, the spend is already in the business and the runway is running out.
That’s how you end up building for demand that was never really there.
👤 Ilias Hatzis is the founder and CEO of Inkjin, Europe’s tattoo marketplace, and writes The Leap of Faith, where he shares what building startups has taught him about traction, growth, and the mistakes that compound. Connect with Ilias on LinkedIn.
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Motion and traction, oh how I wish i fell into the second category but so often end up in the first one. Haha. I can relate to so much here. Thanks for sharing this Daniel!