You Don't Have A Growth Problem

“Dude, this is just so hard.”

Yes. Yes, it is.

You’re stuck at $3M. Or $5M. Maybe you just crossed $8M and dreaming about hitting $20M next year. That took work. And the revenue is real and means something.

You’re growing—and somehow not growing?

Growth for growth’s sake works until it doesn’t.

Here’s what I’m noticing. The primary driver of growth I see in EdTech isn’t a healthy attention to learning outcomes. It’s signup numbers that look good on a pitch deck while retention quietly bleeds. A tool built to sell, not to solve.

Growth can be the right lever if you’re pulling it for the right reasons. But what if you’re worshipping the god of growth when you really have a business model problem?

1) What Do You Actually Want?

There’s only a handful of reasons focusing on growth really makes sense:

• You’re planning an exit and need to reach a certain size to sell
• You want to lead a large team (and you’re really good at it)
• You have something to prove (and being #1 is the only drug of choice for you)

There are advantages to scale. There are also advantages to staying focused and small. The distinction between them is really about what you’ve set out to build.

Do you want any of those things? And does the version of growth you’re chasing still serve that, or has it quietly replaced it?

The unit economics typically reveal whether you’re building what you set out to build—or that you’ve been dragged into something you never set out to be.

The math doesn’t lie. What does it actually cost you to acquire a customer? What’s their lifetime value? If CAC > LTV, are you actually building the mission-driven business you set out to create, or have you been subsidizing a growth story with capital, time, and your own sanity without realizing when the shift happened?

Letting growth happen to you rather than making the choice to grow puts you in an uncomfortable role you may never have wanted in the first place.

2) Did You Build This, Or Did It Just Happen?

It’s not quite as simple as deciding what you actually want to build.

If your EdTech business is stuck in and around $5M–$15M, you didn’t architect your business model. You weren’t really in charge. You survived by feeding the machine. You said yes to opportunities that showed up: yes to the district, yes to that feature request, yes to Higher Ed even though you built for K-12, yes to the growth of your biggest client who is too big already.

Now the business is shaped by everything you’ve said yes to.

And nobody stepped back to ask whether this collection of yeses is actually a model or just an accident that seemed better than your people doing nothing. What you’ve built already needs to fit and be sustainable — or it needs to be unbuilt.

Because the role the business demands today may not be the role you wanted. What you’ve built may now require a version of you that you never signed up for, and the decisions you make may take you further away from the leader you want to be.

Now, look back over the past three years. Does this thing you’ve built actually fit who you are?

Are you the leader that enjoys solving problems directly, being as agile as possible, hiring selectively, staying as small and focused as possible? Or would you rather shape the careers of others, manage the enterprise, step away to work on the business instead of in it?

Neither is wrong. But if the business you’ve accumulated demands one and you are the other, you’re fighting yourself every day.

You built this thing. The business should serve you. Not the other way around.

Financial pressure is the primary reason why you said yes to things you shouldn’t have. Life is too short to be running a business that is running you.

You can’t outrun a structural issue. You can’t market your way out of a business model problem. Pushing harder on the wrong thing just gets you further from where you wanted to be.

I keep a living document on my fancy writing tablet to workshop what I want out of my business (and to give my wife a break from having to be my sounding board). I open it up every so often to make sure my business goals and personal goals are headed in the same direction. If they aren’t, it’s time to course-correct.

Maybe this is enough to check your own situation. Maybe you’d like an outside perspective. If that’s true, I’ll be here when you need me.