Run It Backwards: Why Inversion Is the Key to Fixing Your Broken Growth Engine

**If your growth engine’s leaking oil and spitting smoke, stop the excuses and start asking the upside-down question: ‘How do we kill growth?’ Then run it backwards.** Most SaaS companies troubleshoot growth by looking for shiny tactics to add: more top-of-funnel channels, smarter paid campaigns, or new hires in sales ops. But if your CAC is ballooning, sales cycles are lengthening, or MRR is flatlining, bolting more tools onto a broken chassis doesn’t help. The deeper problem is often strategy debt — and the fastest way to diagnose it isn’t forward logic. It’s inversion. Inversion—made famous by Charlie Munger—is simple: solve problems by asking the opposite question. Instead of “How do we grow?”, ask “What’s *guaranteed* to stop our growth?” Turns out, tracing failure backwards provides better inputs than chasing success forwards. Let’s invert your growth engine. Here are the **Top 5 inverted failure patterns** we see in early-stage SaaS—and how to turn them into unfair growth advantages. --- ### 1. **Break Your ICP: Sell to Everyone** **Inverted failure mode:** Want to guarantee slow, expensive go-to-market motion? Try selling to everyone. Keep your ICP broad, blur your segmentation, and chase any lead who breathes. **How to fix it:** Run an 'anti-ICP analysis'. List the top 10 deals you regret signing—too slow, too low value, too much churn. What do they have in common? That’s your *do not sell to* list. Now crystalize your sharpest ICP based on *exclusion*. Strong positioning isn’t just choosing who you’re *for*—it’s being ruthless about who you *aren’t* for. **Tactical tip:** Tighten your ICP until it hurts. If everyone on your sales team *loves* the refinement, you haven’t gone far enough. --- ### 2. **Confuse the Customer Journey** **Inverted failure mode:** Scatter your messaging across 6 personas. Send 14-step nurture emails with conflicting CTAs. Make your pricing a mystery box that 'requires a demo'. **How to fix it:** Run a 'zero-impact journey' audit. Ask: what’s the fastest path for a real customer to go from awareness to recurring use with minimal mental debt? Then eliminate friction religiously. Most SaaS journeys are built for internal logic—org charts, functional silos, product trees. Try mapping the inverse: remove one step at a time until the journey breaks. Then put back only what adds compounding velocity. **Tactical tip:** Give incentives to your team for *decreasing user decisions*, not content output. Simplification wins. --- ### 3. **Starve Expansion by Front-Loading Everything** **Inverted failure mode:** Go all-in on landing the deal. Overpromise. Deploy senior resources upfront, then leave post-sale to fend for itself. Congrats—you’ve just killed NRR. **How to fix it:** Run a value inversion: assume the moment of sale is *not* the peak value exchange. What would your GTM and product delivery look like *if real value only started 30 days post-sale*? Most churn is seeded at or before onboarding. Ignore this and your retention curse compounds. The fix? Architect the customer experience like a treasure map: every step unlocks new ROI. Customers should feel like even your entry plan makes expansion inevitable. **Tactical tip:** Make CSM influence a board-level KPI. GTM isn’t done at close—it’s just started. --- ### 4. **Add Volume Without System Thinking** **Inverted failure mode:** Bought leads that don’t convert? Added SDRs that don’t book demos? Hired a growth lead, and nothing grew? Welcome to resource waste via isolated changes. **How to fix it:** Adopt systems thinking: your growth engine is an interconnected machine, not a hire-and-hope checklist. Run the 'pressure test' backwards: if you added 10x traffic tomorrow, what would break first—sales, support, onboarding, infra? Most flaws aren’t where the bottleneck *is*—they’re where you’re adding pressure with no capacity. Fix flow first, then volume. **Tactical tip:** Build a failure-mode map by department. Force each exec to list: “Where will our team violate SLAs if we double throughput?” Now you’re designing for resilience, not reaction. --- ### 5. **Outsource Strategic Conviction** **Inverted failure mode:** Rely on advisors, agencies, or playbooks to set direction. If it worked for another SaaS growth story, it’ll work for you… right? **How to fix it:** Invert delegation. Ask yourself: if you couldn’t outsource *any* strategic decision—what would you do differently? Most founders fall into the 'playbook trap' when stressed. But reactive mimicry leads to fragile strategy. You don’t need more advice—you need stronger hypotheses. Remember: great growth engines are *designed*, not adopted. Principles travel; tactics usually don’t. **Tactical tip:** Tie every growth bet to a founder-prioritized thesis. If the thesis is unclear, the tactic is noise. --- ### Final Thought: Inversion as Default Operating Mode Running it backward isn’t a trick. It’s a discipline. Great operators invert on instinct because it saves time, surfaces blind spots, and forces clarity. When the growth engine sputters, don’t add. Subtract. Don’t look for new fuel—find the leaks. Your growth roadmap starts where success ends: at the graveyard of good companies who tried harder, but never thought backward. **Want help running it backwards?** That’s what we do. We're Rated R Group—part fixer, part strategy squad, part operator. If your growth engine is broken, we help rebuild it. One brutal truth at a time. --- **Related Reads:** - HEART Principle for Founders: a crisis-tested mindset shift - Systems Over Sprints: Building sustainable SaaS machines - Hiring for Retention, Not Just Acquisition