Trust before traction

Before I started building MoyoPay in public, I said I would write the journey down. Here is an early lesson, and it is not original, which is why it keeps being ignored:

You build trust before you need it.

Do not wait until you need users to buy, refer, or defend the product before you have a relationship with them. By then you are negotiating without a bench.

What I am actually doing

The list is almost embarrassingly small.

• Talk to early users like they are colleagues, not a funnel stage.
• Involve them while the thing is still ugly.
• Write down the feedback. Then change the product, not just the pitch.
• Keep small promises on the calendar you already named.
• Make the first people feel like insiders. Because they are.

Herb Cohen’s point on negotiation still holds: the relationship is built before the formal event. Growth is the same sport. The engine I want — for MoyoPay, and for any project I help as a growth lead — is the kind where people expand with you because they already believe you will still be there on a bad week.

Traction is a lagging indicator

Numbers arrive late. They are the smoke. Trust is the fire you either tended or didn’t.

I have scaled communities past sizes that look impressive in a thread. Peak growth percentages are catnip. They are also easy to reverse. What does not reverse as quickly is a room that comes back because last month was real.

This is not softness. It is sequencing. Acquisition without trust is expensive. Trust without a product is a group chat. The work is to hold both without lying about either.

I will fail this sometimes. When I do, I will try to write that down too.