Not All Growth Is Created Equal

The difference between looking good on paper and building something real

Lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between metrics that help you raise money… and metrics that help you build something that lasts.

Those two things aren’t always the same.

It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers that look great in a pitch deck: explosive ARR growth, logo count, burn multiples, all of that. Especially right now, in this moment we’re in with AI, where companies are hitting $100M in ARR in under a year. That kind of growth is staggering. And honestly, it’s worth admiring… those are teams moving fast, executing hard, and capturing a huge amount of attention.

But here’s the thing: we’ve also seen how quickly some of those stories unravel. Growth spikes, but it doesn’t stick. Customers churn. Use cases don’t hold up. Value isn’t there. The business deflates.

So if I were advising a founder, someone trying to build something enduring, I’d be thinking about a different set of metrics.

If I were an investor, I’d take deep engagement over fast revenue growth any day.

One of the investors I admire most is Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. He was an early investor in Intercom, and one of his favorite ways to evaluate a product is using a super simple huristic: a stacked bar chart showing the number of days users are active in the product.

What he’s looking for is a bell curve with a fat tail. He wants to see people who are using the product every single day. That, to him, is the clearest signal that a product is deeply embedded in someone’s workflow or life.

And I agree. If people are logging in every day… if they’re in it, living in it… you’ve built something valuable. And from there, you can figure out the rest. You can get smarter about pricing. You can layer in new acquisition strategies. You can run experiments. But it all starts from product obsession.

The inverse, when you have a business that’s growing fast, but no one actually uses the product, is much harder to fix. That’s a business built on shaky ground.

From there, I look at retention. It’s the next layer up. Are customers sticking around? Are they getting value commensurate with what they’re paying?

Because you can have engagement, but if the pricing is wrong or the problem isn’t urgent enough, people won’t stick. And once you have a retention problem, it becomes nearly impossible to build something that compounds. You’re just pouring new users into a leaky bucket.

I tend to think of retention as the intersection of engagement and pricing. It’s where product meets the commercial side of the business. And it’s one of the strongest signals that you’re on solid ground.

Then I start looking at acquisition. And not just top-line growth or lead volume, I want to understand how those leads are coming in. Can you break it down by source, by channel, by campaign? Do you know what’s repeatable? Is there any causality, or is it just stuff “working” because of some big spike, like a launch or a wave of press?

Too often, especially in the early days, growth is built on these one-time events. And they matter! But they don’t scale. What you want to see is some version of: “We did X, and it led to Y.” That’s the foundation of a go-to-market motion that can be optimized and expanded.

Last thing I look at is CAC and LTV. Not because I think they’re great operational metrics, but because they tell you something important about long-term viability.

In my experience, CAC only goes up. You start with your best channels. The cheapest wins. The audiences that are most primed to say yes. But as you grow, those get tapped out. You have to move up the funnel. You have to go broader. You have to start paying more to acquire the next marginal customer.

That’s fine, it’s expected. But it means your LTV better be going up too. That the product is getting better, stickier, more valuable. So what I’m really looking for is: how much room do you have? How much headroom is there in your CAC:LTV ratio for things to get harder, more expensive, and still work?

Anyway. These are just some things I’d be thinking about in building something I wanted to last, and things we think deeply about in building Equals.