Use the Traction Canvas to slingshot past $1,000,000 in revenue
The Traction Canvas™ is a one-page sales playbook created by Brandy Old and Craig Elias, designed to help first-time and technical founders reach $1,000,000 in ARR so they can raise a Series A.
It combines over 35 years of sales and startup experience to demystify how early-stage companies capture their first customers and cross the technology chasm.
In plain terms: it shows you which of 10 sales steps you’ve skipped, and exactly how to go back and fix it.
Sales is a sequence. So is building a startup.
Do the right things in the right order, and everything compounds. Skip a step, and the cracks show up later — in stalled pipelines and churn. Premature scaling isn’t a speed problem; it’s a sequence problem.
Most startups don’t stall because of bad products. They stall because founders skip steps: they try to sell to everyone, pitch features before asking questions, and rush toward the ‘Early Majority’ (the 33% of the market on the far side of the chasm in Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Curve) before they’ve earned it.
Skipping steps is called premature scaling, and it creates friction that keeps founders from ever reaching $1,000,000 in revenue.
When you find the step you skipped, you go back and fix it. We call this slingshotting: going backwards to the step you missed so you can go forwards faster.
Free · Your score out of 100 · The box you’re stuck on · A two-step plan to fix it
The Traction Canvas fixes that with 10 boxes in three key sections, in the exact order they are to be completed:
- LEARN (Boxes 1–5): Founder-led outbound to strangers — 10x the customers you get from selling to your network. Work through Problems, Bifurcation, Competition, Seven Second Sale, and Enrolling before anything else.
- Problems — find a problem big enough that people want to become your customers now, NOT later
- Bifurcation — three questions that find the 12.5% of the market most likely to become your customer
- Competition — how to differentiate yourself from the three forms of competition every startup has
- Seven Second Sale — how to create almost instant interest in any product or service
- Enrolling — how to get meetings with your ICP before you build anything related to your product
- EARN (Boxes 6–9): Founder involved – 10x the LEARN zone again by reaching the right people at the right moment. Master Trigger Events, Disqualifying, Emotional Favourite, and Won Sales Analysis.
- Trigger Events — be first with recently motivated decision-makers and you are 500% more likely to make a sale
- Disqualifying — how to score and disqualify opportunities so you only spend time on the ones most likely to close
- Emotional Favourite — become the person they call first when they’re ready to buy
- Won Sales Analysis — how to find and replicate your biggest and best wins
- SCALE (Box 10): Inbound – Marketing Moat — 10x one more time by being more findable when word of mouth happens by owning the digital real estate for the 2–3 word combinations people use when they tell others about you.
- Marketing Moat — word of mouth is your most powerful channel — make it happen, don’t hope it happens
Each zone multiplies the last: 10x → 100x → 1,000x. The mantra is “Learn before you earn.”
Where Brandy & Craig perfected the Traction Canvas
Across Canada, the US, Australia, Europe and Asia.
Workshops and online startup camps · Pitch coaching · Accelerator and incubator cohorts (including Alchemist Accelerator) · Pitch competitions · Colleges, polytechnics and universities · Startup events (including SXSW)
3 ways founders blow the canvas
→ Work through it with us — Brandy and Craig run the Traction Canvas live with founder cohorts and accelerators, and complete it 1:1 with funded teams. Work with us →
→ Start with Box 1 — Problems — the first box unlocks everything that follows. Start Box 1 →
→ Get the free toolkit below — the fillable canvas, session slides, a one-hour recording, and the Traction Playbook maker.
Get the full Traction Canvas toolkit — free.
Fillable PDF template · Session slides · One-hour recording · Traction Playbook maker
↓ Complete the form below to receive your download links ↓