How Optimising for Value Delivery Unlocks Startup Growth
In my recent talk on The Growth Equation, I shared the story of Marta, a founder archetype whose journey reveals a common but often overlooked challenge in early-stage startups. Marta stands out because she excels where many founders struggle—at customer acquisition.
With a background as a former executive, Marta understands how to craft a compelling narrative and build demand. She has done a great job of building her audience and motivating them to sign up—two critical parts of The Growth Equation. But while she’s successfully driving interest in her product, her story illustrates that even the best sales and marketing can’t compensate for a product that doesn’t deliver lasting value.
Mastering the Market Side of the Equation
Marta is a textbook example of someone who’s cracked the market side of The Growth Equation. She’s built a highly effective outbound sales campaign, boosting her outbound response rate from 2.5% to nearly 7.5%. Her secret? Precise targeting, sharper positioning, and a warm, conversational outreach sequence.
These efforts generate three to four daily demo requests, with at least one conversion per day. The demand is so high that Marta is already considering hiring a sales development representative (SDR) or customer experience (CX) specialist to manage the influx.
Her results extend beyond outbound efforts. Her content marketing and SEO initiatives are gaining traction, and she’s beginning to experiment with paid search campaigns. By all accounts, Marta is nailing acquisition.
When Acquisition Isn’t Enough
Despite Marta’s success in bringing users in, she’s facing a more insidious problem: her product isn’t keeping them.
Only 25% of sign-ups become active users.
Only 10% of users are active after the first 30 days.
Active users churn at a rate of 15% per month.
At this pace, over half of her customers will leave within a year.
The core issue lies in activation and retention. Users aren’t seeing enough value quickly, nor are they integrating the product into their daily workflows. Without these milestones, users churn before they can develop long-term habits or realise the product’s full benefits.
To make matters worse, Marta’s current customer acquisition cost (CAC) now exceeds the lifetime value (LTV) of her users, creating a financial imbalance that threatens her ability to scale—or even secure her next funding round.
The Trap of Building More Features
Faced with these challenges, Marta is tempted to build her way out of the problem. She reasons that more features might lead to more opportunities for users to find value. But this approach risks falling into the Product Death Cycle.
Adding features won’t necessarily solve the core issue—In fact it might make things worse. When value is buried under poor onboarding, unclear workflows, or a lack of usability, adding complexity only increases user frustration.
Marta’s product doesn’t lack value; the real issue is that the value is hard to access.
A Framework for Troubleshooting Growth
To turn things around, Marta needs to resist the urge to expand her feature set and instead focus on identifying the underlying causes of her slow adoption. These are likely rooted in these three parts of The Growth Equation:
1. Time to Value: The time it takes for users to experience the product's core value is too long. New users often fail to see the benefit early on, leading to low activation rates. Marta needs to streamline onboarding and surface the product’s "aha moment" faster.
2. Friction: The product’s sign-up and onboarding processes are riddled with unnecessary steps and confusion. This friction discourages users before they’ve even had a chance to experience the product. Simplifying these processes will remove barriers and improve conversion rates.
3. Stickiness: Users aren’t embedding the product into their workflows or finding reasons to return regularly. Without creating habitual usage or clear value reinforcement, churn rates will remain high. Marta must design features and interactions that encourage repeated engagement and reliance on the product.
By addressing these areas, Marta can shift her focus from acquisition alone to creating an experience that delivers immediate, sustained value.
Build for Value Delivery, Not Just Acquisition
Marta’s story is a powerful reminder: no amount of sales and marketing can make up for a product that fails to deliver enough value to users over a sustained period. Growth doesn’t come from focusing on acquisition alone. Sustainable growth happens when your product delivers value quickly, removes barriers to adoption, and integrates seamlessly into your users’ lives.
By addressing activation and retention, Marta can shift from a cycle of high churn to one of compounding value. It’s about creating a system where each part of the business—product, market, and customer experience—works together to reinforce growth.
This approach is at the heart of The Growth Equation. By understanding the balance between product and market, founders can move past surface-level strategies and focus on the deeper levers of sustainable growth. Whether it’s reducing friction in your onboarding process, helping users find their “aha moment,” or driving habits that lead to long-term loyalty, the key is aligning these elements to create a growth engine that lasts.