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| | What is the most common problem with the Traction Slide? | Very simply, there are three problems with traction slides: | You don’t have traction You present the wrong/fake traction You don’t place it properly within the deck
| Problems with the traction slide are extremely common, largely because founders either (i) understand the importance and use this as the slide where they are willing to take liberties with the truth, (ii) overvalue their innovation and undervalue traction, meaning they either leave this out completely or have suboptimal slide placement. | Let’s look at how to solve these three problems. | | AI Agents Are Reading Your Docs. Are You Ready? | | Last month, 48% of visitors to documentation sites across Mintlify were AI agents—not humans. | Claude Code, Cursor, and other coding agents are becoming the actual customers reading your docs. And they read everything. | This changes what good documentation means. Humans skim and forgive gaps. Agents methodically check every endpoint, read every guide, and compare you against alternatives with zero fatigue. | Your docs aren't just helping users anymore—they're your product's first interview with the machines deciding whether to recommend you. | That means:
→ Clear schema markup so agents can parse your content
→ Real benchmarks, not marketing fluff
→ Open endpoints agents can actually test
→ Honest comparisons that emphasize strengths without hype | In the agentic world, documentation becomes 10x more important. Companies that make their products machine-understandable will win distribution through AI. | Make Your Docs Agent-Ready | |
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| If you don’t have traction, then you need to go to first principles and find some form of traction to share. Traction is just proof that you have some evidence that your company will work. Even if you don’t have sales, you can run a survey. Do something so that you are more than a person with an idea. You need to find some evidence that there is demand for your product or that people believe in you/your team/your company. Anything that doesn’t prove that the market is accepting your solution is not traction. Getting into an accelerator is not traffic. Getting funding from your university is not funding. Don’t try to bullshit this. It makes you look immature and unfit to raise capital. It’s better to say you have none than to pretend that investor signals or third party funding is equivalent to market acceptance. If you have strong traction and not much else, then your traction should be placed early in the deck. I’ve seen decks with incredible traction, but it's the last slide, and 50 %+ of investors didn’t even get to it before clicking off. If you have great traction, then you need to get that into the deck early; it will earn investors’ respect and give them more reason to trust you and believe in you as they read the deck.
| | Does your deck feature any of these common problems? | | | Are you tracking agent views on your docs? | | AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them. | See your AI traffic! |
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