Growth Is Value Flow, Not Vanity Metrics

After shipping a bunch of different projects, I’ve seen a pattern emerge: teams focus endlessly on metrics that look good but mean nothing.

More signups, more impressions, more “engagement” - but are these users actually getting value?

This obsession with vanity metrics is why growth has become a dirty word in many circles. Worse, it creates perverse incentives that can corrupt even the purest souls.

We’re optimizing for the wrong things.

# Why “Growth” Got a Bad Reputation

When you hear “growth” in startup circles, you probably think:

• Tactical spam: more emails, more popups, more “Did you forget something in your cart?” notifications
• Channel obsession: endless debates about TikTok vs SEO vs outbound before we even know why anyone should care
• Vanity metrics: dashboards full of signups and impressions that say nothing about real value or retention

We all have been there. That world treats growth as “make the graph go up,” even when we don’t know what is actually working or why.

The problem isn't growth. The problem is optimizing metrics that don't matter.

# A Better Definition: Growth as Value Discovery

Here’s what I’ve learned through painful experience:

Growth is the discipline of discovering, validating, and scaling how a product creates and captures value for real people.

Or simply put: it’s about finding the thing that makes people’s lives better, then making it accessible to more people who need it.

This framing changes everything:

• It assesses the potential for product–market fit (and reveals when it’s not there)
• It’s horizontal: it connects product, marketing, data, support, ops, sales
• It’s integrative: it checks whether the story, the product, and the numbers all line up

When the product is bad, growth surfaces that—it can’t compensate. When the product is good but invisible, growth fixes discovery and distribution. When acquisition is great but retention sucks, growth focuses on onboarding and value delivery.

# The Growth Mindset vs “Growth at All Costs”

We tend to equate growth mindset with relentless optimization. Turns out, it’s something else entirely:

A growth mindset is a commitment to reality over ego: relentlessly testing how, where, and for whom the product creates sustainable value—and then aligning the whole company around what’s true.

Let me share the principles:

1. Truth-seeking, not story-seeking

Metrics aren’t there to make investors happy; they’re there to tell you if users actually care. Bad news (churn, low activation) is data, not a personal failure.

I’ve seen maany times how metrics can be deceiving, e.g.: a high signup rate means nothing if users aren’t getting real value.

2. System thinking over isolated tactics

Signups without activation are noise. Traffic without clear messaging is waste. Features without distribution are dead weight.

Real growth looks at the whole loop: awareness → consideration → activation → value → habit → advocacy. Break any link in that chain and you’re not growing—you’re leaking.

3. Hypotheses over hacks

Not: “Let’s add a referral program because Dropbox did it.” But: “Our best users come from word of mouth. Hypothesis: lowering friction to invite will increase high-quality signups. How do we test this?”

The difference is subtle but crucial. One is cargo-cult copying; the other is scientific discovery.

4. User value as the primary constraint

“Will this get us more users?” is the wrong question. “Will this get us more happy users who stick around because they get real value?” is the bar.

5. Horizontal responsibility

Growth isn’t “the marketing team.” It’s everyone asking:

• Product: “Are we solving a real job enough that people come back?”
• Marketing: “Are we telling the clearest possible story about that job?”
• Data: “Where does the loop break?”
• Leadership: “Are incentives and roadmap aligned with reality?“

6. Finite + infinite game

Yes, growth cares about this quarter’s metrics. But it also cares whether those metrics come from building a stronger engine or from one-off tricks.

# How This Changes the Role of Growth

Instead of “the team that runs experiments on the signup form,” growth becomes:

The Sense-Making Function

Growth maps the user journey end-to-end. It identifies bottlenecks (“We don’t have an awareness problem, we have a ‘confusing value prop’ problem”). It translates messy cross-functional data into: “Given everything we’re seeing, the highest-leverage bets right now are X, Y, Z.”

The PMF Barometer

Pre–product-market fit, growth asks: “Who really gets value from this? What is the sharpest, most painful problem we’re solving?” You’re not optimizing funnels yet; you’re discovering who you’re for and what actually works.

Post–product-market fit, growth asks: “How do we systematically find more people like our best users, get them to value faster, and help them form habits?”

The Integrator of Content, Product, and Distribution

If you have a good product but no content, no one will know. If you have great content but no product, you’ll disappoint everyone. A growth mindset sees:

• Product = the value
• Content & brand = how that value becomes legible to the world
• Channels = the roads that content travels on
• Operations & support = what keeps the experience consistent as you scale

Growth is the discipline that checks: "Does the value we promise, the value we deliver, and the value we measure all match?"

# What I’ve Learned

The biggest insight is that we need to shift from “how do we grow?” to “what is value and how does it flow?”

When teams stop trying to hack growth and start trying to understand value, everything changes. Metrics improve because understanding improves. Acquisition becomes more efficient because they know who they’re serving. Retention increases because they focus on what matters.

Growth isn’t about tricks. It’s not about optimizing every last conversion point. It’s about building something people want, understanding why they want it, and making it accessible to more people who need it.

The rest is just noise.