HeyJaredTraction Lab Podcast
The Traction Lab Podcast is a light-hearted, science-based weekly to help first-time founders go from fuzzy idea to real traction with honest insights, tactical experiments, tons of snark, and zero startup BS. zerototraction.substack.com
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 16
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest episodes
Bring on the AI co-founders! (opens the original)
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Hey friends 👋 You know the founder who swears he’s going to buy a boring, profitable business instead of building one from scratch? Turns out that’s way harder than the internet makes it sound. Joshua Thacker tried it, walked away from two deals, and ended up building his own AI-powered software company instead — without writing a single line of code. This week we sit down with Joshua, the founder of Searcher OS — or is it chairman now? — to talk about what happens when you stop hiring and start
Traction Lab Live: Is that traction, or are they just being nice? (opens the original)
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Hey friends 👋 You have a handful of paying customers. People keep telling you the idea is great. And somewhere in the back of your head there’s a voice asking whether any of it is real, or whether you’ve just collected a small pile of people who didn’t want to hurt your feelings. That voice deserves an answer. This week we pulled out the Strength of Evidence Matrix to separate a friend who said kind things from a stranger who actually paid you — and got into why “people lie in customer interview
#107. Sales playbook, or sales guessbook? (opens the original)
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Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern: sales feels gross, so the second you can afford it, you hire someone who’s “done this before” to build the process and go sell your s**t for you. Except that no playbook exists yet. The founders haven’t found it — and an outside hire never will. This week, Cam and JDM dig into where that “ick” around selling actually comes from. The check? Who’s supposed to be bringing the pressure to the table? Then they lay out the five things that have to repeat, in exact l
Bruh you be tweakin’ (opens the original)
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Hey friends 👋 You know the pattern. Founder gets a no, goes home, and rewrites the business model slide. Tweak the header, reorder some bullets. Progress! Comes back a month later with a shinier deck and the exact same business. We call it tweaking, and this week we’re calling it out directly (with love, mostly). The pitch competition circuit trains founders to treat the deck like the product. It isn’t. Your deck is a window, and no amount of new drapery fixes the view if you’re still looking ou
Traction Lab Live: That feature request is probably a polite no (opens the original)
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Hey friends 👋 You’ve heard it before: “We love it, we just need the Salesforce integration first.” Or the dental office manager who “has to check with the doctor.” Founders treat these as real objections — they build the feature, they wait out the delay, they hope it resolves on its own. JDM (solo this week, Cameron’s in Maui) says that’s backwards. Most of these aren’t objections at all — they’re polite nos, or worse, aspirational yeses that nobody’s actually going to act on. This week’s AMA co
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