Why it's dangerous to scale a product with questionable product/market fit

Here’s why it’s so dangerous to scale a product with questionable product/market fit: The Traction Treadmill

It’ll kill your company.

Let me explain why it happens.

Sometimes you build a product that’s just doing okay. Not great, but not bad either. Users show up, and some of them stick around – but not many

Some teams look at this and are overly optimistic – it’s time to scale. Just add users, instead of increasing stickiness

And this works, for a time. You can grow fast just by doubling ad spend. Or tripling ad spend

In the early days this works. 3x with 1,000 users just means you need to buy 2,000 users

Repeat again?

Here’s the problem: Then a large % of those users burn off. That’s fine, maybe just replace them?

To 3x again, you have to replace the % you lost plus buy another whopping amount just to grow

That might work, if you’re still dealing with 1,000s or 10,000 users

The traction treadmill eventually arrives once the numbers get big

This is when you lose a % of users fast, but then just have the budget and funding to replace them- but then can’t keep grow on top

You start running hard and just staying in one place

You might increase budgets. Pay up on CAC/LTV. Optimize and run experiments. And that works.. until the treadmill reappears

The problem with the treadmill is that your team and scale makes it hard to iterate substantially on the product and business. You’re locked in

If things flatten for months, or a year, eventually morale becomes a problem. Options start to narrow. And the real solution – to increase stickiness – becomes too slow and complex to execute

Then you fall off the traction treadmill. Game over.

In the end, this story isn’t about polishing your product forever. But it’s important not to do it prematurely either – because it’s often unfixable.