A waitlist isn't traction

Most Australian founders know they need traction before they raise.

Many of them build the wrong kind.

A waitlist of 3,000. A launch post that went viral. A few thousand followers. A mention in a startup newsletter.

It feels like momentum. To an investor, it's attention. And attention isn't evidence.

The money is there. The bar is higher.

Australia doesn't have a capital problem. Startups here raised $5.4 billion across 390 deals in 2025, the third-largest year on record.

But it's selective. The 20 largest deals took 58% of the money, and investors point to a shortage of lead investors that keeps stretching pre-seed and seed timelines.

In a market like that, investors don't back momentum. They back proof.

Attention versus evidence

Attention is people noticing you. Evidence is people doing something that costs them.

A waitlist sign-up costs nothing. A paid pilot costs money.

A like costs nothing. Coming back in week six costs time.

Your network sharing your launch costs nothing. A stranger converting from cold traffic tells you the message works without you in the room.

Investors have seen a thousand waitlists. What they rarely see is a founder who can show why strangers buy.

What marketing is for before the raise

Not awareness. Evidence.

Find out why people buy. Not the demographic, but the trigger: what happened in their week that made them go looking for a solution.

Test the message on strangers. Put a small budget behind a landing page aimed at your ideal customer. If people who've never heard of you convert, that's proof you can show. If only your network converts, that's a warm audience, not a market.

Measure what happens after the first yes: activation, repeat use, referrals. One cohort of customers who stick is worth more than any launch spike.

The waitlist that looked like traction

I worked with a founder who came to me with what looked like exactly the kind of traction investors want: a large waitlist, strong engagement on LinkedIn, and a launch post that had travelled well beyond their immediate network.

The problem was that almost none of those people had actually bought anything.

The founder wasn't being naïve. They had done what they'd been told to do: build an audience, create buzz and show investors that people cared about the problem. But underneath the headline numbers, there was very little evidence that strangers would pay for the solution.

So we stopped trying to grow the waitlist and ran a much smaller experiment. We built a landing page around the clearest version of the proposition, put a modest paid budget behind it and deliberately targeted people who had never heard of the company.

The first result was uncomfortable. The conversion rate was dramatically lower than it had been with the founder's existing audience.

But that was useful. It told us the waitlist had been measuring interest, not demand.

We changed the message, tightened the audience and ran the test again. This time, cold traffic started converting into genuine enquiries. The founder could now show investors something far more useful than a big number at the top of a funnel: strangers were willing to take the next step without being personally persuaded by the founder.

The waitlist hadn't been worthless. It had answered one question: can we get people interested?

The test answered the question that mattered more: can we get people who don't know us to act?