This article is based on Chris Howard’s experience working with founders, investors, and analysing thousands of early-stage companies. His message is straightforward.

Most founders focus on the wrong things when building an MVP. They chase design, features, and “storytelling,” while ignoring the one signal investors trust the most. Real behaviour.

Your MVP exists to show whether your solution changes behaviour in the real world. Nothing else matters in the early stages.

Investors know early-stage bets are risky. They want evidence they can rely on if things fall apart.

Something they can point to and say,

That’s all traction is at the start. A safety layer.

Most founders misunderstand this and assume traction means signups, downloads, or marketing metrics.

These numbers look impressive but prove nothing. Anyone can generate shallow engagement with ads or a polished landing page.

Investors look past all of this. They want a signal that is hard to fake and tied directly to behaviour.

There are four clear traction signals, each tied to a stage of the company’s journey.

Day Zero: Founder Fit

You can raise money with no product and no traction, but only if your past work proves you can solve extremely hard and relevant problems. Investors back you, not the product. This only works when your background gives them confidence that you can build the thing faster and better than anyone else.

Pre-seed and Seed: MVP Behaviour

This is where most founders sit. Here the only meaningful signal is simple: users who return or refer. A user who tries your MVP once tells you nothing. But a user who comes back willingly or tells someone else to try it is a strong indicator that your solution delivers real value. This is behaviour change, and it’s the signal investors trust the most.

Series A: Customer Proof

At this stage, the focus shifts from users to customers. A user is the person who consumes your product. A customer is the person who pays. Sometimes they are the same person; sometimes they aren’t. Series A investors want to see customers who purchase and repurchase, or bring in other customers. This shows that value is not only delivered but monetised in a repeatable way.

Series B: Business Model Strength

Once behaviour and commercial value are proven, traction becomes about margins, efficiency, and scale. By this point, the product signals should already be clear.

Founders often mix these two and weaken their traction story.

For example, a developer using a tool is a user; the company paying for the tool is the customer.

If you show customer traction without user traction, or user traction without customer value, the story falls apart.

An MVP is not a polished version of your future product. It is not a feature list. It is not a design exercise. Your MVP is a test. A small, focused experiment designed to prove or disprove whether your solution changes behaviour.

If you overbuild, you delay learning. If you polish too early, you hide problems instead of finding them.

The job of your MVP is to give you the earliest possible signal of whether you are solving something real.

Behaviour change shows up in two places: someone returns to use your product again, or someone tells another person to use it.

These two signals are extremely hard to fake.

Marketing can push someone to try something once. Discounts can create activity. Campaigns can create spikes.

But nothing forces a person to come back unless the product solved something for them. Nothing forces a person to refer unless the value was meaningful. This is why investors treat return or referral as the core early signal.

Most MVPs fail because founders build too much.

They create something heavy, complex, and filled with features that don’t matter.

They spend time polishing design instead of testing behaviour. By the time they put it in front of users, it’s too big to learn from.

They confuse building with progress.

Real progress comes from testing behaviour early, with the smallest version of your solution, in a real environment.

Their answers guide your next steps far better than any feature roadmap or internal brainstorm.

Retention is the cleanest early proof that your solution creates value.

If people come back, the value is real. If people don’t, the value isn’t strong enough yet.

Referrals sit on top of retention and signal deep value.

Someone referring your product means their behaviour changed, they believe in the solution, and they want someone else to benefit.

These signals matter far more than downloads, signups, or traffic.

You know your MVP is ready for investors when users return without being chased, refer without incentives, and describe the value of your product in simple words.

You are not ready if people disappear after one use, if you rely on discounts to keep them, or if the value is unclear.

Investors don’t fund opinions. They fund signals.

There is a clean, predictable path.

Everything rests on behaviour.

Your MVP exists to test behaviour, not prove a vision.

The smallest version of your solution must show the world reacts the way you expect.

If people return, the test works. If they bring others, the signal is strong. If neither happens, the test tells you what to fix.

This is how you build real traction and raise properly without wasting months on the wrong things.

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