Growth

The acquisition chart goes up and to the right. Everyone cheers. The chart is lying to you. James Sinclair cuts through the celebration in Starting a Startup with a line that should be on every founder's wall. Pull in users who leave and you have not grown. You have spent money to manufacture an exit. Growth that outruns retention is churn wearing a nicer outfit — all vanity, no sanity. He is hard on the growth tactics founders treat as magic. Product-led growth, viral loops, the strategy of the month — none of them is a strategy. They are tools, and they are neither cheap nor all-powerful. Run any of them well and they amplify a product people stay for. Run them on a leaky product and you are burning cash with extra steps, paying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom. ...

You act like the person you think you are — right up to the edge of it, and no further. Tony Robbins calls identity the key to expansion, and the warning underneath is sharp: your self-image is a ceiling. You'll spend exactly as much of your talent as your sense of who you are permits. Raise the result above the identity and you snap back, every time, like a thermostat correcting the room. ...