Not all growth is good growth
Growing the wrong users is worse than not growing at all — it costs more and masks the real problem.
A counterintuitive truth: it is possible to grow into the wrong kind of company. Every founder assumes growth is good — that more users, more revenue, more logos is universally positive. Sometimes it is. Often it quietly isn’t.
The wrong-users problem
Every product has users who are ideal and users who aren’t. The ideal users are the ones you designed for: they get the most value, churn the least, and spread the word. The non-ideal ones are harder to serve: they use the product in ways it wasn’t built for, demand features you never planned to build, and leave anyway after burning support time.
When growth is indiscriminate, you acquire both kinds. The wrong-user cohort grows faster than the ideal cohort, because wrong users are usually cheaper to acquire — they’re less specific, they say yes to more things, they fill the top of the funnel. Over time, the product starts to optimise for them, because they’re the majority.
“The wrong users are the ones you build the wrong product for.”
How this kills good companies
Slowly. Feature requests start drifting — away from the ideal use case, toward the average one. Support load grows disproportionately — wrong users need more help because the product wasn’t built for them. Retention drops, but nobody can figure out why, because the cohort composition changed quietly over quarters.
The founder looks at the numbers and sees slowing growth. The instinct is to acquire more users. More users means more wrong users. The loop tightens.
Signals you’re growing in the wrong direction
Support volume growing faster than user count. Feature requests that contradict each other more frequently. Churn rising even as acquisition improves. Sales calls getting harder to close, not easier. NPS dropping despite product improvements.
Each of these individually is ambiguous. Together, they mean the user base you have isn’t the user base you designed for.
What to do instead
Define the ideal user specifically. Not ‘SMBs.’ A role, a scale, a scenario. Write it down. Share it with the team. Put it on the wall.
Track cohorts by user type, not by sign-up date. A dashboard that shows ‘ideal-fit users this month’ separately from ‘everyone else’ tells you whether you’re growing in the right direction, not just growing.
Be willing to turn people away. The healthiest products we’ve worked on have explicit ‘this is not for you’ moments — in the marketing, in the sales process, even in the onboarding. It feels counter-commercial. It compounds into a much better business.
Growth is a number. Good growth is a composition. Watch what kind of users you’re accumulating, not just how many. The ones you attract define the product you’ll end up building.