One part of the funnel is always broken

Whether you’re experiencing meteoric growth, or stuck in a stagnant rut, one thing is guaranteed: There is always one part of your growth funnel that is broken.

Founders often ask me: “At what point does this get easy?” The honest answer is never, because today’s success creates tomorrows problems. Whenever you fix a step in your funnel, you create a problem somewhere else.

Top of funnel is the first growth problem a startup will face. How do I get people interested in my product? No matter how you fix this problem, when you do, you’ll uncover problems deeper in your funnel. Now that you can get people interested in your product, can you actually close a deal?

And once you work out how to close deals, you’ll realise how difficult it is to onboard a customer.

And once you solve that, you’ll realise how hard it is to retain a customer.

It doesn’t stop there. As soon as you feel like the whole funnel has been worked out, and growth is orderly and efficient, your standards for growth will raise. Achieving twenty-percent growth on $200K ARR is a lot simpler than twenty-percent growth on $20M ARR. So, top of funnel will become a problem again. How do we get a lot of people interested in the product?

This is when you realise your sales or onboarding process can’t handle this volume of new customers, so you’ll need to overhaul that again.

Rinse and repeat. Eventually, you’re growing through acquisitions, product expansion, and talking about $10M monthly sales targets. And each of these things will fundamentally break how your organisation works.

Why point this out? Because it’s important to realise that many problems are the direct result of success in other areas. You need to solve these problems. But you also need to learn to live with them. Because there will always be problems. Something will always be broken in your growth funnel. So learning to enjoy the journey and persevere is essential.

Additionally, it’s useful to predict future problems. If you know that outbound sales will not scale to your quarterly growth goals in a years time, you should think about what new functions, people, products, and ways of working you will require, and start to invest now. If you’re expecting explosive growth in one part of the funnel, there’s a good chance the next stage will need an overhaul. When setbacks are expected, you can prepare for them, and reduce the negative impact.

Many founders burn out because they’re always praying for the problems to finally ease. And, sure, you will occasionally experience short periods where things seem to be going well. But it’s always only a matter of time before your success leads to more challenges. This is the way. The most investable and likely to succeed founders are those who, either naturally or through personal development, can soldier on and even enjoy this process. Because it is fun! Especially when you learn to not take things personally, and accept setbacks as a central component of building something great.