Are You Bleeding Margin While Chasing Growth?

Why companies obsess over acquiring new users—and quietly lose the ones they already earned.

Every company says they care about their customers.

But what they usually mean is: they care about getting new ones.

Behind the scenes, budgets, incentives, and dashboards are built for one thing—acquisition. It’s legible. Easy to justify. Satisfies the board. Looks great on slides.

You can have record-breaking growth and still be quietly killing your business.

Because when companies obsess over growth, they often end up doing more of the wrong thing. More ads. More salespeople. More onboarding flows. All while the people who already trusted them are left to figure things out alone.

Churn numbers become background noise.

“It’s a little higher this quarter.”

“We had some turbulence.”

But churn isn’t weather. It’s a warning.

And it rarely starts with a bang. It starts with silence.

Silent Churn Is Your Real Competitor

People don’t leave because of a dramatic failure. They leave slowly.

They stop logging in.
Ignore your emails.
Stop mentioning you.
Switch tabs instead of tabs open.

Then one day, they’re gone.

Not because your product broke. But because someone else made them feel smarter, safer, or more valued. And you never noticed.

This is silent churn—and it’s your blind spot.

Because it doesn’t show up in postmortems. It doesn't yell. It just walks away.

Most teams don’t even track it. Because it doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet or pitch deck. But it’s bleeding you every single day.

Growth Theater vs. Real Growth

Most companies are addicted to what looks like growth.

The symptoms:

• Performance marketing outpaces customer success 10:1.

• Product roadmaps favor shiny features for new users, not depth for loyal ones.

• The company celebrates logos, not longevity.

• You know your CAC by heart, but couldn’t draw your retention curve past 3 months.

That’s not strategy. That’s growth theater.

It creates the illusion of progress while hiding decay. It prioritises optics over outcomes. And it’s incredibly expensive.

Every euro spent chasing new users leaks value when the ones you already have are slowly leaving.

You’re sprinting just to stand still.

Retention Isn’t a Metric. It’s a Strategy.

Retention is usually treated as a lagging metric. But it's actually a strategic orientation.

And it compounds. Quietly. Powerfully.

Here’s what a single percentage point improvement in retention can do: