Traction Lab Podcast

JDM and Cameron Law
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Business
  • Updated Biweekly

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

  1. 3d ago

    Shmillip joins the shmow (finally)

    Hey friends 👋 It’s a story old as time. You walk on stage to pitch your startup, and the speakers start blasting “Loser” by Beck. (Literally.) Then investors tell you your market is too small — for a company whose customer base is, quite literally, everyone. This week we finally brought Phillip Mason into the studio. Yes, that Schmillip. He’s the founder and CEO of LilyPay (ShmillyPay?), a payments and financing platform for the death care industry — about 200 families served and 225 funeral home partners in a year and a half. So naturally we spent the whole hour on his losses. It’s an in-person founder psychology episode: how to hear “no” without rewriting your pitch after every call, when a dozen investor conversations start to look like a story, and why the hardest decisions are the ones the data won’t make for you. Plus, the question nobody has a clean answer to—how do you stay delusional enough to start and grounded enough to survive it? (Phillip’s answer involves… Chumbawamba, apparently?) In Frivolous Thoughts, JDM hands out gel cubes, Cameron rides into Deadwood, and Phillip defends the South’s claim to Kentucky. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    Shmillip joins the shmow (finally)

  2. Sep 23

    Bring on the AI co-founders!

    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 deploying. Four AI agents now run his customer support, engineering fixes, content, and — the part that got us a little rattled — his entire calendar and inbox. His chief-of-staff agent knows more about him than he knows about himself. We get into how founders can actually start (no OpenClaw, no Hermes required — just Claude Code and twenty bucks a month), why treating AI like a thought partner beats treating it like a search bar, and the company brain concept that’s either genius or deeply unsettling depending on your tolerance for machines reading your old emails. Also: Cameron’s Kings hope, Joshua’s canyoneering trip through Zion, and JDM’s strawberry co-fermented coffee that may or may not redeem JDM’s bougie subscription habit. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM Links * Joshua Thacker: joshuathacker.com * SearcherOS: searcheros.ai * Traction Lab: tractionlab.io Timestamps * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:30 - Meet Joshua Thacker and Searcher OS * 07:00 - Why buying an existing business is brutally hard * 11:00 - Building four AI “agent realms” instead of hiring * 18:00 - Naming your bots (Muppets vs. the Bobiverse) * 24:00 - The company brain: 2 million words and counting * 34:00 - How to start today for $20/month * 41:00 - Choosing a model: generalist vs. deep expert * 45:00 - Are AI agents coming for your job? * 53:00 - Frivolous Thoughts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    Bring on the AI co-founders!

  3. Sep 20

    Traction Lab Live: Is that traction, or are they just being nice?

    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 interviews” is a lazy description of a much bigger problem. Social pressure is the least of it. You’re also seeding the answer you want, and you’re talking to the aspirational version of someone who fully believes they’re about to start going to the gym. The rest of the hour: landing a first corporate contract without eating the cost of every run, the three pricing dials founders forget they have, and what to fix when you’re trying to monetize a product before you know whose problem it solves. Also, Cameron joined straight from a horse show, and JDM explained where his thing for “cerulean blue” comes from. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    Traction Lab Live: Is that traction, or are they just being nice?

  4. Sep 16

    #107. Sales playbook, or sales guessbook?

    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 lockstep, before you’re anywhere close to a real, repeatable sales process: same customer, same pitch, same channel, same motion, and same objections. That data doesn’t get delegated, either. You put in the boots-on-the-ground work long enough to have something worth writing down, and the playbook falls out the other end. And in frivolous thoughts: a startup lesson from Apple’s first foldable phone — proof that being first to market means far less than being ready to dominate once the market finally shows up — and a surprising Netflix recommendation. And, as always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM Timestamps * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:15 - Why founders avoid sales * 08:00 - Where the pressure should actually come from * 16:00 - What goes into a sales playbook * 24:30 - The five-part pattern that makes it repeatable * 33:00 - Where the data actually comes from * 38:00 - Frivolous Thoughts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    #107. Sales playbook, or sales guessbook?

  5. Sep 9

    Bruh you be tweakin’

    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 out over a dead field. We get into the version-to-conversion ratio, why most of the feedback you get lives way higher on the pyramid than you think, and the three questions that’ll tell you if you’re a tweaker. Plus: the real antidote, which is less dopamine, more discomfort. Fresh off a Maui trip in which Cameron was brutally mugged by the ocean (three times!), and JDM’s latest music finds tie a little too well into this week’s theme. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM Links * The Investor Feedback Pyramid * The Bad Actors Timestamps * 00:00 - Cold open: back from Maui and ready to call some patterns out * 03:15 - Naming today’s topic, the “Bro, You Be” tweaking edition * 05:00 - How the pitch competition circuit breeds serial deck-tweakers * 07:15 - The dead field metaphor: better drapery won’t fix a bad view * 10:00 - The version-to-conversion ratio * 13:30 - Selling the business model, not the story * 16:00 - Three warning signs you’re a tweaker * 18:15 - The investor feedback pyramid, revisited * 23:45 - Procrastivity: the dopamine hit behind deck tweaking * 28:15 - The real antidote: evidence over facade * 32:15 - Frivolous Thoughts: Maui losses and new music finds This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    Bruh you be tweakin’

  6. Sep 6

    Traction Lab Live: That feature request is probably a polite no

    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 covers a lot of ground: a $200/month dental SaaS stuck in a three-to-four-month sales cycle nobody’s actually verified; a pre-revenue gaming app blaming retention for a problem it doesn’t have yet; and a founder chasing enterprise logos without one to show for it. Same thread runs through all of it — stop reading intentions and start asking for something concrete: time, effort, access, or money. Also: Josh recaps emceeing Pitch Elk Grove the night before (congrats to Krokos Bio), admits he’s out of coffee, and vamps solo through the intro without Cameron there to tell him to wrap it the F up. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM Timestamps * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:00 - Is it really a sales cycle problem, or a sales problem? (dental SaaS) * 12:00 - Why “bad retention” isn’t your actual issue pre-revenue * 20:00 - Landing enterprise clients without a Fortune 500 logo * 40:00 - The say/do gap: turning “yes, but” into a real commitment * 49:00 - Virality, leagues, and order of operations (Tiny Golf) * 1:05:00 - Wrap-up and how to submit your own question This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    Traction Lab Live: That feature request is probably a polite no

  7. Sep 2

    #105: You can’t win a game you can’t see

    Hey friends 👋 You know the pitch deck slide. “Use of funds: 30% marketing.” Cool, cool. Except you can’t describe your customer in one sentence, and you’ve never gotten a stranger to actually pay for anything. That’s an expensive guess wearing a blazer, not a strategy. This week Cameron and I finally deliver on the battleship metaphor we’ve been promising for months — the one we actually teach inside the Traction Lab Venture School. Go-to-market is Battleship: hidden board, no data, every experiment either a hit or a miss you’re supposed to be tracking. Marketing is Risk: full visibility, known customers, known channels, bigger bets you’ve earned the right to make. Most founders skip straight to Risk-level spending while they’re still playing Battleship blind. We walk through the startup core, the riskiest-assumption framework (hello, desirability/viability/feasibility), and the four questions that tell you which game you’re actually in. Also: we recap our latest High Conviction Happy Hour, and Cameron has a new fidget timer that may or may not have a functioning keyboard. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM Timestamps * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:15 - Why the battleship metaphor * 05:30 - Defining negative space through hits and misses * 12:45 - The startup core and the riskiest assumption * 25:00 - Go-to-market vs. marketing (and why agencies make us cringe) * 40:00 - Frivolous Thoughts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    #105: You can’t win a game you can’t see

  8. Aug 31

    Traction Lab Live: a company, or just a popular repo?

    Hey friends 👋 JDM ditched us for Bodega Bay this week (family time, apparently more urgent than your traction problems), so Cameron ran the live AMA solo — and the questions did not go easy on him. One founder’s got six enterprise design partners raving about a 40% drop in alert volume. Zero of them have signed anything. Another’s watching champions cheerlead internally, then go quiet the second procurement gets involved. A third has 6,000 GitHub stars, 60 weekly actives, and exactly zero paying customers. Cool numbers, empty bank account. Cameron works through the gap between interest and intent, why your biggest fan usually isn’t your economic buyer, and the cheapest test you can run this month before building one more enterprise feature nobody’s actually offered to pay for. There’s also a scheduling SaaS founder trying to figure out if 11 closed deals are a channel or just 11 coincidences, before he burns $400K finding out the hard way. As always, thanks for listening. —Cameron and JDM This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com

    Traction Lab Live: a company, or just a popular repo?
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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    JDM and Cameron Law
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    112
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © JDM & Cameron Law
  • Show Website
    Traction Lab Podcast