Fales Traction: The Evil Twin
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Why growth that looks real can quietly destroy a business
If growth feels heavier every quarter — not lighter — there’s a name for what you’re experiencing.
Revenue is moving. The team is growing. The pipeline is active. And yet the business isn’t compounding the way it should. That gap between what growth looks like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside isn’t a motivation problem. It isn’t even a demand problem.
It’s false traction.
False traction is the evil twin of real progress. It creates the illusion of momentum — deals closing, customers existing, the team always busy — but underneath, every win increases drag faster than it builds momentum.
Apparent progress and real progress aren’t the same thing. One compounds. The other accumulates drag.
Here’s how it tends to show up.
The founder is still in the room for most deals — closing, unblocking, explaining. Every win comes with a slightly different shape: custom requirements, edge cases, exceptions made because the revenue was tempting. Lead flow arrives in spikes. Channels look promising but don’t reliably produce the right buyer. And forecasting feels like guesswork, because it is.
None of these are signs of a broken business. They’re normal signals of a company chasing revenue before repeatability is proven. The danger is that false traction feels like progress. The numbers are moving. The team is busy. But it doesn’t compound.
This is harder to spot if you’re building in a category that doesn’t exist yet.
In an established business entering a known market, the fundamentals are already resolved. The category is clear. The buyer is understood. The channel is proven. You can borrow the playbook because the playbook fits.
An innovation-led startup is in a fundamentally different position. The category is undefined or still forming. The buyer is often discovering the problem at the same time you’re solving it. Nothing is a known quantity yet. Traction here cannot be borrowed. It has to be built from proof of progress.
The most common place I see this go wrong: a founder hires a VP of Sales from an established tech company and hands them the wheel. The intent is right — bring in experience, build the motion. But two things happen.
Sales becomes revenue-driven rather than traction-focused. The team chases any deal that looks closeable, follows revenue signals instead of building a focused acquisition motion. In a new or forming category, that’s the opposite of what’s needed. GTM strategy at this stage isn’t about maximising revenue. It’s about proving repeatability with the right buyer.
And the playbook gets operationalised at speed. CRM workflows, sales cadences, pipeline stages — all stood up quickly, all looking like execution rigour. But if the direction isn’t right yet, operationalising it faster just institutionalises the wrong motion. The system works. It’s just pointed the wrong way.
Left unaddressed, it doesn’t plateau. It becomes the spiral.
Cash is thinning even though customers exist — because the last round was spent patching fundamentals, not building them, and the next raise is already being planned. The team is always working, but always on something for revenue that hasn’t arrived yet. The product has branched in so many directions that no one can describe it simply. The company competes in everything, owns nothing, and is the default choice for no one. Effort is high. Momentum is low. Everything feels like moving through mud.
This is the everything-is-possible trap. No clear category. No repeatable motion. A position impossible to articulate because it’s trying to be too many things at once.
And a downward spiral is hard to unwind.
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To read the full article now — including why a funding round amplifies false traction, a $3 billion case study of the drag spiral in action, and what real traction actually looks like:
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Josephine Too is the founder of Sofos Advisory, helping innovation-driven founders turn apparent progress into compounding progress — so growth holds through stage transitions and builds toward category leadership.
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