You Don't See How Fast the Duck Is Paddling

A CEO told me recently, "It's starting to feel like we have to force growth."

He's right, and it's not as unnatural as it sounds. Nearly every Series B+ SaaS company goes through this. From the outside it looks like successful growth. You don't see how fast the duck is paddling underwater.

Here's the metaphor I use with founders. A car in a straight line is predictable... all the force sits on one axis. Add a turn on top of acceleration or braking, and you're asking four small tire patches to handle two forces at once. That's when cars spin out.

Forced growth is the same. A company nails product/market fit in one lane, then growth demands a turn: a new vertical, geography, pricing model, or buyer. This isn't a pivot, the core already works. It's a high-speed turn while still running the core business at full throttle.

At Bazaarvoice, luxury retailers kept rejecting our Ratings & Reviews pitch. They didn't want customers publicly rating products. So I asked the team to remove the rating entirely. What was left was a title and an open text field for customers to tell their own stories. Five days of work. A new product at 70% of the price, and our way into a vertical that had said no before.

That's successful forced growth: a small, sharp turn on the existing car, not a new car.

The simplest framework for choosing where to turn is the Ansoff Matrix: existing or new customers, crossed with existing or new products. Weight your choice toward whatever sits closest to your core competency. (For more, read Profit from the Core by Chris Zook.)

The question isn't whether to force growth. In my experience, every VC-backed company eventually has to. It's whether you can make the turn without losing a tire.

Where's your organization mid-turn right now?