Pillar
Growth traps
The deals that look big and aren’t. The marketing that buys vanity. The growth that breaks the company that earns it.
Most failed companies look like they were growing right up until the quarter they didn't. The growth was real. The trap underneath it was also real, and longer.
A growth trap is any pattern where the metric improves while the underlying business deteriorates. Revenue up, cash down. Logos added, churn deferred. ICP drifted, pipeline inflated. The trap is hard to see because the dashboard is reading the version of the company that's working. The version that's breaking lives one query deeper.
The essays here name the traps the operator can still escape. The deal that looks big and isn't. The marketing that buys vanity. The customer who's worth less than they cost. The growth that breaks the company that earns it.
Start here
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Doubling the Channel Halved It
Spend up 40%, pipeline up 60% -- the team celebrated. Six months later conversion collapsed. The 'doubling' was buying the wrong customers.
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What Your Loudest Customer Costs
6 tickets a week, 4% of revenue, 40% of your team's attention. The math behind firing the loudest customer and serving the quiet majority.
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Don't Hire a Head of Sales Yet
The hire feels like the fix. It's usually the cap. Until the founder has closed ten deals on the same playbook, the Head of Sales has nothing to inherit.
More on growth traps
- The ranking with no buyers
- Winning the Open Rate, Losing the Inbox
- 40% of Signups, Gone by Tuesday
- 804 registrants, zero net customers
- Stop optimizing for the keyword nobody buys on
- Eighty-six integrations, four that work
- A twelve-week launch that froze the company for a quarter
- The retention number measured on the wrong cohort
- Don't Build a Waitlist You Can't Nurture
- Signups rose 30%. Revenue fell 12%.
- The competitor you copied into irrelevance
- The customers you're winning aren't the ones you're selling to
- Category creation is usually vanity
- The persona you invented to explain a slow quarter
- The international expansion before product fit