Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

At Hustle Fund events, we get one question from founders over and over again: "What kind of traction do investors want to see?"

There are plenty of resources that outline generic numbers at each stage. Typical seed traction is around $10K per month. Series A is $2 to $3 million per year. We have published those benchmarks ourselves.

But here is the thing. Hustle Fund is a pre-seed fund. We see a lot of companies that are pre-revenue, pre-customer, and pre-product-market fit. It is not that we do not want to see revenue, customers, and PMF. It is just that by the time startups have those things, they are often raising at a stage and valuation beyond our model.

So at the earliest stages, what are we actually looking for when we evaluate traction?

Why Traction is in the Framework Even When Numbers Are Tiny

Hustle Fund uses a five-pillar evaluation system: team, problem, solution, market, and traction. Traction is in there even though we invest pre-revenue. Why?

Because we want to see that the founder is doing something to move the business forward.

It is okay if they do not have customers yet. But too often we meet founders who have an idea for a startup and not much else. They have talked to their friends about the product they want to build. Maybe they spun up a landing page. They might have gotten a few people on an email list.

Those are not indicators that this founder is committed to solving a massive problem or serious about building a real business. Traction at the pre-seed level is not about impressive numbers. It is about evidence of momentum.

What We Actually Look For

Here are the specific signals that tell us a founder is doing the work.

Customer discovery depth. We want to see proof that the founder is talking to the people they think are their target audience. Not just a few friends. Ideally dozens or even hundreds of people through actual phone calls, not email surveys.

These conversations should give the founder a unique perspective on the user's real problem, how the user solves that problem today, and what the pain points are with current solutions. They should also have a deep understanding of their target customer's profile: their age, their jobs, where they spend time online and offline.

Elizabeth Yin has talked about how the best founders she has ever backed are incredibly metrics-driven. They understand the funnel of a customer: how much it costs for someone to learn about you, how much it costs to turn that person into a paying customer, and how much you make from that customer over time. At pre-seed, the numbers might be tiny. But the thinking should already be sharp.

Pre-sales or waitlist. We want to understand if the founder is building an audience of potential customers. For B2C companies, do they have an email list or waitlist of people they can start selling to once the product is ready? For B2B companies, have they lined up organizations willing to beta test? Or even better, do they have customers committed to paying once the product is built?

A founder who has 500 people on a waitlist who signed up because they saw a landing page is interesting. A founder who has 50 people on a waitlist who signed up after a 15-minute discovery call is much more interesting. The depth of the relationship with potential customers matters more than the count.

Experimentation velocity. This connects directly to Eric Bahn's thesis about hustle being great execution at high velocity. We want to see founders moving fast and trying things, even if those things are not perfect.

Are they exploring partnerships as a customer acquisition channel? Are they measuring engagement across different platforms? Are they A/B testing messaging on their landing pages? Are they playing with different approaches to user engagement and tracking what works?

A founder who has tested five different approaches to acquiring customers and can tell you what worked and what did not is showing you exactly the kind of rapid learning that predicts success. A founder who has been working on a pitch deck for six months and has not talked to a single customer is showing you the opposite.

Traction Does Not Equal Revenue

At the pre-seed and seed level, it is totally appropriate to ask about revenue, users, and email list size. But really, anything above zero is pretty exciting at this stage.

What tells you far more is the depth of the founder's insights about their users and their plans for customer acquisition. Why did they pick this customer segment? How did they find their first 10 users? What did they learn from those users that changed their approach?

Those answers reveal the quality of the founder's thinking in ways that a revenue number never will. A company doing $5K per month with a founder who deeply understands their customer funnel is a much better bet than a company doing $20K per month with a founder who cannot explain where the revenue is coming from or whether it is repeatable.

If you want to learn how to evaluate traction like a pre-seed investor, Angel Squad members practice this alongside Hustle Fund's team across the 1,000+ startups reviewed monthly. It is the fastest way to develop the instincts that separate experienced investors from beginners. Check it out at Angel Squad.

Traction at the earliest stages is not a number. It is a signal of how this founder operates.