What to do when growth stalls
Revenue has gone flat. Where do I actually look first?
A stall is always located somewhere specific: fewer people arriving, the same people converting worse, buyers spending less, or customers leaving faster. Find which of those four moved before you change anything. Most stalled companies fix the loudest thing rather than the moved thing, and lose a quarter doing it.
Write the four numbers down in one line: people arriving, share who convert, average amount per buyer, share who stay. Compare this period to the two before it. Exactly one or two of them will have moved materially. That is where the stall lives.
| What moved | What it usually means | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Arrivals fell | A channel decayed or a source stopped | Rebuild the channel that carried the most, before starting a new one |
| Conversion fell | The offer no longer matches who is arriving | Talk to five people who did not buy |
| Average value fell | Discounting, or the wrong segment bought | Check who bought in the last 30 days versus the 30 before |
| Retention fell | Delivery quality or the promise drifted | Call the last five who left. Not a survey — a call. |
Do not fix all four
A stalled company has limited attention. Pick the moved step, choose one change, and set the number that would prove it worked and the date you will check. If you cannot state that number, the change is a hope, not an experiment.
A stall has an address. Find the step that moved before you fix anything.
Do this next
- Write the four numbers for the last three periods on one page.45 minutes
- Circle the one that moved most. Name it as the stall.5 minutes
- Run five conversations with people on the losing side of that step.3 hours
- Set one experiment with a target number and a check date.20 minutes
Avoid
- —Starting a new channel because the current one got hard.
- —Redesigning the site before diagnosing the step.
- —Judging the change before enough volume has passed through it.
“Which step of my funnel moved in the last 90 days, and what does the evidence say caused it?”
Ask Aury thisLast edited 2026-08-18