Sales can be used as tool to validate your business idea because if you can get a sizeable number of people to PAY for your product or business idea, it's a sign that there's unmet demand for that target customer base.

What about business ideas that don't have paying customers right away?

That's the situation that our brothers and sisters in the tech space often have when they come out with that new-fangled idea for an app or website that's supposed to revolutionize the world.

These websites or app ideas usually rely on network effects before they can become profitable.

Network effects are the possibilities, value, and leverage that you have when you build connected networks of groups of people. The network is only as valuable as the number of nodes, people, or connections that they have.

If only 600 of us signed up to Facebook in the early days, then it wouldn't be worth anything today.

There's not much value in a social network of only 600 people. If those 600 people are all billionaires on the other hand, then that's a different story!

So how do you show progress with your idea when you need people to sign up today with hopes of monetization tomorrow?

That's where TRACTION comes in.

Traction in this case would be HOW MANY PEOPLE SIGN UP, HOW QUICKLY THEY TAKE ACTION, and FOR HOW LONG they remain with you.

These figures are signs from the market that people think your business ideas is valuable and that they're driving value from the network.

If your app idea attracts only one person per week for six months straight, it's doubtful if that's a spectacular business idea.

On the other hand if 1,200 people sign up in the first number of days, it might be a sign that you have a hit on your hands.

That was the early Facebook experience.

That was a sign and market validation that the idea was worth exploring even if in the early days they weren't sure how the website would make money.

Traction is a sign of market validation and permission to you to move ahead FOR NOW.

So long as you have validation at your current stage, it's a sign that there's much more to explore ahead.

So if your big business idea is an app to connect rural rice farmers in Lagos, Ilorin, and Osun to exchanges and commodity traders in ABJ and LAG, then maybe for the first couple of months, you shouldn't worry about how much sales you make.

You should be concerned rather about how many rice traders and intuitional "agric" people agree to sign up to the site in the first place.

If only one village of 200 FARMERS signed up in 2022, then maybe the road to utopia is still far off and fraught with many challenges.

But if you were able to attract 200 VILLAGES of 120,000 farmers in 2022, then that might be a good enough sign to ask your financiers to give you more money to pursue the idea.

So that's it!

Sales or traction is a sign from the market and other stakeholder that you have a valuable business idea worth pursuing.

So do you have sales, traction, or both regarding your business idea?