Interview with Saher Shodhan, Co-Founder and CEO at Marketing Recruitment Platform Traktion

Traktion is a platform that makes hiring for growth simpler, faster, and more profitable for businesses. Our system of verification and matching ensures that businesses are only matched to marketers who have a proven track record for their specific marketing needs.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

While running their previous businesses the founders realised just how much money they were spending on marketing talent, without getting results. Despite digital marketing being data-driven in its delivery and measurement, we recognised that the discovery and selection of marketing talent was still very traditional. The idea for Traktion was to leverage the vast amounts of data that is present in digital marketing to generate a superior system for finding, hiring and managing digital talent.

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

1.    Iterate quickly: Take your idea to market and get feedback from users. Communicate this feedback with your team and ship revisions as quickly as possible. It’s easy to keep ideas in your head but the true test of your proposition and product will come from your users.

2.    Become good at rejection: No matter how good your idea or your execution, there will always be people who are not interested, don’t understand what you’re doing, and some who actively want to see you fail. Take their feedback into consideration but don’t be put off by rejection. As you build, test, and launch your business you need to accept the feedback but tune out the negativity.

3.    It takes more time than you think: Founders are notorious for expecting hockey stick growth (myself included). Take your time and iterate rapidly until you find the combination of proposition, offer, pricing and marketing clicks. This can take several months or even years. Don’t lose sight of the overall vision for your business and make sure you are leaving a healthy buffer when fundraising.

What can we hope to see from Traktion in the future?

1.    Data-driven marketer profiles: Rich, multidimensional marketer profiles that go far beyond just reviews and ratings. We are leveraging our data to enhance our marketer profiles so that businesses can get a full picture into their experience and skills, but more importantly, their past performance data as well.

2.    Multi-channel benchmarking: Having access to marketing data means that in the coming months Traktion will be able to see and analyse marketing data from across different marketing platforms and disciplines. We intend to leverage this performance data (anonymised and aggregated) to showcase what average performance across key metrics looks like in different industries and to allow businesses to get a better idea of their relative performance vs. peers