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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The free trial that was selecting for the wrong user
Trial signups were up forty percent. Conversion was down sixty. The funnel was working — for the wrong people.
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The vanity metric on the homepage
'Trusted by 12,000 teams.' Half of those teams were free users who logged in once. The number was technically accurate and strategically useless.
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The case study customer who churned
Their logo was on the homepage. Their quote was in the deck. They had canceled six weeks before the marketing team noticed.
More on growth traps
- The partnership announcement and the silent quarter
- The viral spike that taught the wrong lesson
- Your biggest customer is teaching you the wrong product
- The feature request that was actually a refund request
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- How to Excel in Your Career and Entrepreneurship
- Taming the Tigers: Regaining Focus in a Distracted Team
- Entrepreneur vs. Businessman: Ideas vs. Scaling
- Structuring and Running a Successful Online Sales Company
- Small Business Delegation: Trust to Grow
- Personalizing Business Interactions for Success
- The Theory of Games Applied to Business: Embracing the Infinite Game
- The Right Way to Delegate: Eliminate, Simplify, Automate, Delegate
- Strategies for Effective Brand Positioning in Competitive Markets