How do you know you are fixing the right growth problem?
Most growth plans start with an answer.
More traffic. A new channel. Better onboarding. A pricing test.
The plan starts before the problem has been properly named.
A business can be getting signups and still have a conversion problem. It can have decent traffic and still be attracting the wrong people. It can have customers and still be losing them before they get enough value.
I’m building Hacknator around this gap.
The idea is to make the business model visible as a set of movements: who needs to move, from where to where, and what work is actually meant to improve that movement.
So I’m curious:
What are you trying to improve in your business right now?
And what makes you think that is the real problem?
I’m reading every reply. I’m also mapping a small number of real founder cases as I build Hacknator.
If you would be open to letting me look at your situation more closely, add “open” at the end of your reply. I’ll reach out to a few people where there is enough context to go deeper.
The triad works better as layers of the same model than competing frameworks. Movement is the who and what. Score is the now. Checklist is the how. It avoids treating conversion data as a single number. One thing I keep circling: the score and checklist are only as good as the objections they capture. In our automation work, founders are often wrong about what is actually blocking their users. The objection they name is rarely the one in the data. Do you see founders misdiagnose their own objections too?
Yes, all the time.
But I do not think founders are usually looking in the wrong area. More often, they stop at a label that is too broad.
“Price is the blocker” may be true at a high level, but it can mean very different things: the payoff is unclear, the payoff is not believable, the current alternative already feels good enough, or the problem is simply not urgent enough.
They all show up as “price,” but they are different reasons for someone not to move.
That is where movements help me. They keep the question grounded: why is this person not moving from A to B?
Then “price” becomes a hypothesis to test against the losses we see, not an answer we automatically build the score or checklist around.
It feels close to the automation version of “we need an agent”: often a real signal, but still too broad to build against.
The "price" unpacking is exactly the right level of specificity. From our automation work, the most common hidden objection is "the effort to adopt doesn't feel worth it yet" — which founders lump under price or no interest. Breaking those apart changes what you build. "We need an agent" ⭢ "what work is not happening" is the same pattern. The movement framing gives founders a reason to slow down before the build starts, which is where most of the waste actually lives.
The "growth plans start with an answer before the problem is named" framing is sharp, and it's the trap most founders fall into.
One thing worth building into Hacknator's core: founders fix the wrong problem not from lack of data, but because they reach for the problem they know how to solve. A technical founder sees an onboarding problem because they can code a fix. A marketer sees a traffic problem. The bias is "which problem matches the tool I'm holding." If your map surfaces where the real drop is vs where the founder wants to act, that gap is the actual product.
For us the real problem is conversion, not reach. People find us and don't get why we're different from ChatGPT. A positioning gap, not a traffic one. Open.
What made you map it as movements rather than a funnel?
Your case is exactly why I use movements rather than only a funnel.
“Conversion is the problem” is still too broad. Every part of the journey is a conversion: visitor to lead, lead to user, user to customer, customer to repeat customer.
The useful question is: which move is not happening, and what would have to be true for that person to make it?
I’d keep “positioning gap” as a hypothesis for now, not the conclusion.
Someone may reach Hivemind and not understand why it is different from ChatGPT. But they may also understand the difference and still feel that ChatGPT is good enough, that the difference is not worth the price or effort, or that the problem is not urgent enough to solve now.
A rough way to pressure-test that: if Hivemind were free and took no effort to try, would these people still stop? If yes, the issue may be understanding or belief. If no, they may understand it perfectly well but not see enough value relative to the cost, risk, or switching effort.
Same outcome. Very different reasons.
That is why movements are useful to me. They make us ask what is stopping a specific person from advancing before we jump to copy, product, pricing, or another familiar fix.
Your “tool in hand” point is exactly the danger. Without that step, a marketer rewrites the page and a builder adds features before either knows what is actually making the move not worth it.
Since you said open, send me a quick note at lucas@hacknator.com and I’ll follow up there.
I think one of the hardest parts is that the same symptom can support several different explanations.
Low conversions could point to positioning, onboarding, pricing, or simply attracting the wrong audience. At the beginning, they can all look equally plausible.
What has helped me is thinking more about reducing ambiguity. Each new piece of evidence should help rule out one or more explanations rather than simply reinforce the one I already believe.
That shift has made me much more cautious about jumping from a metric to a solution.
I think you are getting at something more useful than “reduce ambiguity.”
Maybe the unit is not the conversion rate. It is the lost decision.
Two products can both convert 5% of visitors:
In another, they understood the offer but the next step did not feel worth the money, effort, risk, or alternative they already use.
Same rate. Different losses.
That changes what evidence is for. It is not there to make our preferred explanation sound smarter. It is there to help explain why we are losing people at a specific movement.
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For "Visitor to Lead", the question is not only “why is conversion low?” It is “what made this person decide not to raise their hand?”
No need. No trust. No clear value. Too much friction.
Once one of those reasons starts repeating, you have something much more useful than a weak metric. You have a real place to investigate.
That is why I prefer movements. A funnel tells you the rate. A movement lets you diagnose the loss.
I’d diagnose this by instrumenting the transitions instead of debating channels in the abstract: impression → qualified visit → signup/download → permission step → activation → repeat use. The first steep drop tells you which hypothesis deserves attention. I’m dealing with this on a finance product where a sensitive account-connection step may be the real trust boundary, so I’m separating “started connection” from “finished connection” before pushing more traffic. open
That split makes a lot of sense. I like that you are not treating “activation” as one black box.
The thing I would pressure-test is whether "Started Connection to Finished Connection" is where the decision breaks, or simply where a decision that was already weakening becomes visible.
By the time someone reaches that step, they are not arriving cold. They are carrying the value they expect to get, the trust the journey has built, and every objection that is still unresolved.
So the question is not only: “Is the connection flow itself creating friction?”
It is also: “Before asking for account access, have we made the payoff concrete enough, and resolved enough of the objections, for this next step to feel worth it?”
I am not saying the product lacks value. The question is whether that value is visible and credible enough at that exact moment.
If it is, connecting the account should feel like the natural next move. If it is not, even a smooth flow can still lose people.
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Your split tells you where the loss becomes visible. Then you can inspect both the connection step itself and what the person was carrying into it.
Since you said open, leave the best email to reach you at, or send it to lucas@hacknator.com, and I’ll get in touch.
The 'growth plans start with an answer before the problem is named' framing is something we see a lot with founders approaching automation too. They reach for 'I need an AI agent' before asking what work actually needs to happen. The bottleneck is usually not the tool, its understanding the workflow to the point where you can automate parts of it. When you map the actual movements, do founders often discover the thing they thought was broken is actually fine and the real constraint is somewhere they hadnt been looking?
Sometimes, yes. But I do not think the most useful discovery is always that the founder was looking in the wrong place.
Usually the visible gap is real.
If a company needs more customers, that is real. If "Visitor to Lead" is weak, that movement is weak. The map does not make the problem disappear.
What it often reveals is that the team has skipped a more basic question: why would this specific person move at all?
A lot of products are built first, then the team starts looking for who might buy them. So they try to improve conversion before they have made the customer, the job, or the value exchange clear enough.
Framing it as a movement makes that easier to inspect:
Someone is in state A. We want them to move to state B.
Then “we need more leads” stops being the whole plan. It becomes a real but incomplete observation. The real work is understanding what a visitor would need to see, believe, or receive before becoming a lead.
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That is where I think it connects to automation too. An AI agent may genuinely speed up a workflow. But before automating it, you still need to know what movement that workflow is meant to create, and why the person on the other side would choose to make it.
The part that sticks with me is connecting the movement framing back to automation. Most teams automate a flow before asking whether the person on the other side actually wants to make that move. The result is a faster version of something that was never quite right, and the speed just makes the wrong outcome arrive sooner. What got you to land on movements rather than a simpler model like a score or checklist?
That is a good question. I do not see movements, scores, and checklists as alternatives. They describe different parts of the same thing.
A movement is simply a person going from point A to point B.
That move happens when the perceived value of moving outweighs the reasons not to move: price, effort, risk, trust, uncertainty, inertia, or the alternative they already have.
The checklist is what needs to change for that balance to move in the right direction: which values need to become clearer or stronger, and which objections need to be reduced or resolved.
The score is a reading of that same balance: for this person or segment, how much reason do they currently have to move, and how much resistance is still there?
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So, for "Lead to Customer":
That is what got me to movements first. Without the movement, a checklist becomes a generic list of things to optimise, and a score becomes a way to rank people without understanding what is actually stopping them from moving.
The movement is the foundation. The score tells you the current balance. The checklist tells you what needs to change it.
This framing of movement as foundation, score as current balance, checklist as what needs to change — that's the most useful articulation I've seen. In automation we see teams build a checklist (onboarding steps, feature list) without the movement question: why would this person want to go from A to B at all? The result is a faster version of a path the user was never sure they wanted to take. Movement first, then speed.
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Yes. Mapping the journey is a much better starting point than debating channels in the abstract.
The trap is going from “this is where people drop” to “this is what we need to fix.” A large drop can be friction, but it can also be normal qualification, a bad measurement boundary, or the downstream effect of something earlier.
So the journey should give us the first question, not the first tactic: what would actually have to be true for this transition to improve?
This comment was deleted 2 months ago