Jun 12, 2026
You've read the listicles. "12 reasons your SaaS isn't growing." Improve onboarding, post on LinkedIn, try PLG, raise prices, lower prices.
Here's the problem with lists: they assume everything matters equally. It doesn't.
Growth problems look like a hundred things. In every stalled product I've audited, they were almost always one or two. The job isn't to do more — it's to find which one or two, fix those, and ignore the rest until they become the constraint.
So instead of a list, here's the actual triage. Four questions, in order. Stop at the first "no" — that's your constraint, and nothing downstream of it matters yet.
Not your investors. Not your team. Strangers in your target market, after 30 seconds on your homepage.
Run the five-customer test: ask five recent customers what your product does and why they chose it. If you get five matching answers that also match your homepage, pass. If you get five different answers — or worse, five polite paraphrases of your tagline — you have a positioning constraint.
Why this is first: a positioning problem makes every other metric lie to you. Your ads "don't work" — but they're advertising something nobody can parse. Your trial conversion is "low" — but half your signups thought you were something else. Fixing funnels on top of broken positioning is rearranging furniture in a house with no address.
If you answered no, stop here. This is the cheapest constraint to fix and the most expensive one to ignore.
Positioning is clear — is there actually traffic, and is it the right traffic?
Look at one number: qualified conversations per week. Demos with people who match your target customer, trials from companies in your segment, real inquiries. Not sessions. Not impressions.
If that number is near zero, you have a demand constraint. The fixes are unglamorous: pick one channel where your buyers already are, and go deep enough to get a real signal — which usually takes 8-12 weeks, not the two weeks most teams give it before switching channels again. Channel-hopping is how a demand constraint survives for years.
A note for products that "work but aren't selling": this is usually where you live. The product was built before the demand question was answered. The good news — it's answerable now.
People show up, understand you, and then... don't buy. Now — and only now — is it a funnel problem.
Find the one big leak. Write your funnel as numbers: visitors → signups → activated → paying → retained. One of those arrows is losing more than all the others combined. That arrow is the work. The rest is noise.
The most common leaks I find, in order: a trial that never reaches the moment of value (activation, not signup, is your real top of funnel), a demo-to-proposal gap where deals quietly die, and pricing pages that create anxiety instead of resolving it.
One leak. Fix it. Re-measure. Then, if needed, the next one.
You're acquiring and converting — is the bucket holding water?
If monthly churn is eating your acquisition, you don't have a growth problem; you have a retention problem that growth spend is subsidizing. This is the constraint founders find last, because new logos feel like progress and churn arrives quietly, a few months later.
The diagnostic: talk to the customers who stayed longest and ask what they'd lose if you disappeared. Their answer is your real product. Often it's narrower than what you've been building — which means part of your roadmap is serving customers you're churning anyway.
They're not in the tree because they're not constraints — they're tactics. Each one is only worth doing if it attacks the constraint you found above. A new feature won't fix unclear positioning. AI won't fix a leaky funnel — I say that as someone who builds AI products for a living. Spend nothing on tactics until you know which question you failed.
Most teams know, somewhere, which question they'd fail. The listicles are popular because they let you work on question 3 when the answer to question 1 is no — funnel work feels like progress, and positioning work feels like admitting something.
Find the constraint. Put a number on what it's costing you. Fix that. The other eleven items on the listicle can wait.
If you want a second set of eyes: I run this exact triage as a free growth audit — written findings memo in 7 days, including what to skip. Most teams execute it without me. That's fine. That's the point.