Mark MacLeod says venture-backed CEOs stuck in flat growth are fixing the wrong problem. Instead of tweaking pricing or sales, find the biggest friction point where customers drop out and eliminate it entirely. Lovable removed the need for developers, ChatGPT removed the need for AI expertise, and Shopify removed the need to build a store.
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Anton Ashika's company Lovable just did something insane. Zero to $100 million revenue in 8 months. Record-breaking growth. I coach venture-backed CEOs. Most are stuck at flat or linear revenue growth. The difference isn't luck. It's not timing. It's one thing Anton did that regular CEOs don't do. If you want to unlock revenue growth in your business, hit subscribe. Let me show you what's actually blocking your growth. Here's what I see with flat revenue CEOs. They blame the market, they blame their team, they blame their product. But when I dig in, the real problem is always the same. They're optimizing what exists instead of creating what's missing. They're tweaking pricing, improving features, hiring more salespeople. It's all useful. None of it unlocks revenue growth. New revenue growth comes from doing something fundamentally different. Not doing the same thing but better. The CEOs I work with who 2x their business in 6 months all do the same thing. They identify the biggest friction point in their market and they eliminate it. Anton did this. Lovable eliminates the friction of building software. You describe what you want, Lovable builds it, no developers needed. OpenAI did this. ChatGPT eliminates the friction of accessing AI. No PhD required. Shopify did this. They eliminated the friction of launching an online store. Notice the pattern? They didn't build a better version of what existed. They removed the reason people weren't buying. Most CEOs ask, "How do we sell more?" Growing CEOs ask, "Why aren't more people buying?" Completely different question. Completely different answer. Here's how to find your friction point. Step 1: Map your customer's journey from problem to solution. Not your sales process, their actual journey. What do they have to do, learn, buy, or change to get the outcome they want? Step 2: Find where customers quit. Most potential customers quit before they even talk to you. They decide it's too hard, too expensive, too risky, or takes too long. Status quo is your number one competitor. Look at your traffic versus demos, demos versus close, closes versus implementations. Where's the biggest drop-off? Step 3: Eliminate that friction entirely. Not reduce it, eliminate it. If onboarding takes 90 days, how do you make it instant? If your product requires training, how do you make it obvious? If buying requires a committee, how do you sell to one person? This is where most CEOs stop. Because eliminating friction usually means changing your product, your pricing, or your go-to-market. It's uncomfortable, it feels risky. But this is exactly why stuck CEOs stay stuck. They won't make the hard change. Step 4: Test it fast. You don't need to rebuild everything. Find one customer segment, one use case. Test if removing that friction actually unlocks revenue. If it works, you've just found your new growth lever. Now scale it. Here's what happens when you unlock new revenue growth. You face problems you've never faced before. Scaling issues, systems breaking, team gaps. These problems force you to develop new capabilities. You can't read your way out of them. This is why revenue growth is the number one thing that you can do as a grow as a CEO. Not books, not podcasts, not advice. Growth forces you to become the leader your company needs. The CEOs who do this don't just hit their numbers, they become completely different leaders. 6 months. Here's what to do right now. Map your customer journey. Find where people quit. Pick one friction point you could eliminate in the next 30 days. Not reduce, eliminate. Then test it. See if it moves revenue. If you want to work through this with other CEOs who are actually doing it, check out Limitless.co, link in the description. And if this was helpful, subscribe for more content on unlocking growth as a CEO. Now close this video and go find your friction point.
