On Agbada X: The best way to gain traction for your startup

You don’t have a great product if you can’t pick up traction without spending money and getting word of mouth. — Everette Taylor, VP of Marketing @ Skurt

Greetings to you there. I don’t blog entertainment but I’d love to give a brief run down of how things went down during the weekend. This is for the benefit of those who were too busy to keep up with #BAAD2017. So musician Banky W and Actor Adesua held their traditional wedding, an occasion which was graced by a large chunk of celebrities as expected.

One of the talking points of the event was Ebuka Obi-Uchendu’s agbada – Agbada X (culled from iPhone X). This nickname which I think was given by Asemota speaks volume of the value and hype this agbada gave and was given. Ebuka trended as much as the whole wedding did. Many said he had overdressed but that is none of my business.

While I am not here to write about Ebuka all day, what caught my attention the most was the claim that the tailor (Ugo Nwonye) of Agbada X had his instagram followers grow from about 5,000 to 15,000 in just 24 hours.

#BAAD2017 ebuka's tailor before and after the wedding. Hope his client has increased to. @Ebuka @ugomonye @BankyW @AdesuaEtomi . pic.twitter.com/P2a8U13apb

— female Elon musk (@iamrashroly) November 20, 2017

So it got me thinking about traction, and the best way to get it for our tech start-ups. At least, following this purely Nigerian model won’t get us accused of sheepishly toeing the Silicon Valley route.

So what is the best way to gain traction?

My simple answer – Give your customers a platform tell your story (see – Piggybank).

Sorry, you can as well stop reading if you don’t have a good product or service. Customers don’t share those, and if they did, it won’t be to your favour.

If I were to judge by the number of tweets referring other people to a product or service, I’d say Piggybank has the most word of mouth referrals. The platform which allows people to save directly from their debit cards also have a “piggybank story” platform where customers tell their own piggybank story. What does this platform do? It helps project Piggybank as a platform that customers are happy with. And trust me, customers are like sheep, they’ll most likely move in the same direction.

You never know which customer would give you that much needed audience to help surge your traction. Agbada X’s tailor never did.

Why am I so concerned about traction today?

Market traction is just one factor that that will determine a VC or Angel’s interest in funding your company, but it can be very important. According to Angel List co-Founder Naval Ravikant, traction is “quantitative evidence of market demand.”