Instinctive Spread: The Rookie Move
Updated: Oct 2
Last time I wrote about False Traction™ — growth that looks real while quietly accumulating drag — and said I'd come back to what you have to stop first.
There are several but one sits underneath most of them, and it's the hardest to stop because it's the easiest to justify.
You have revenue (~$1–10M), a team, a pipeline with names in it. And growth is getting heavier rather than lighter.
You're not short of effort. You're short of grip.
Traction describes what happens where effort meets ground and becomes movement. Everything that doesn't make the transfer burns off as heat and noise.
The move
When growth feels heavy, it reads as a coverage problem. Not enough shots on goal. So you widen. Another segment. Another use case. Another partner. Another version of the product for the buyer who nearly said yes.
I call that the Instinctive Spread™ — and it is The Rookie Move.
Not rookie because the founder is inexperienced. Most have already built something real. Rookie in the way a strong player rushes a position too early: the instinct is aggressive, the read is wrong, and the cost doesn't show up until two moves later.
Two founders who built to scale say the same thing.
Mark Finn, co-founder of ROLLER, put it plainly: "you earn the right to expand over time." The company began as a booking system for trampoline parks and is now the category leader for leisure and attractions. Wedge into the right segment first. Prove it. Then grow both customer count and product from that base.
Leigh Jasper co-founded Aconex — eighteen years to a $1.6 billion (AUD) acquisition by Oracle. He wrote recently that Aconex only really took off in the US once they stopped trying to serve every construction project and narrowed right down to mining. A lesson learned the hard way.
Expanding before you've earned that right is the most natural move a founder can make at this stage — and the one that costs the most.
It's the skiing problem. On a steep slope every instinct says lean back into the hill. Lean back and your edges lift, you lose grip, and you accelerate. What works is committing down the hill — the last thing your body wants to do.
Narrowing feels like leaning down the hill. That's why almost nobody does it.
A list is not a sequence
Most companies at this stage have three or four that could work. That's usually where your ICP work landed — accelerators teach it, and it does a real job: it tells you which profiles are most likely to buy. What it doesn't tell you is which one to go first, or what going first should produce.
An ICP gives you indicators. The sequence is the map.
A sequence has an order, a reason for the order, and a connection between the steps — the proof you build here makes entering there cheaper. Each one earns the next. That's compounding, and that's a Traction Sequence™.
A spread has none of that. It has a list.
From the outside, on a slide, the two look identical. Both have logos next to them. The only difference is whether anyone can say why that order and not another — the question nobody asks in the meeting where the spread gets agreed.
There's one real exception. If you're funded well enough to go after all of them at once — properly staffed and delivering on each — then sequence matters less.
Everyone else is spending one team and one budget. That isn't an argument for doing less. It's an argument for doing it in order, so that you need less capital to get to the same place.
Why it's so hard to stop
Nobody spreads by accident. Every widening decision gets made in a meeting, with reasons — and the reasons are good.
The segment's too small to build a real company on.
We should test a second vertical to de-risk.
The partner opens a whole channel — we'd be mad not to.
We need the number this quarter and that segment isn't producing fast enough.
Not one of those is stupid. And they arrive from the people whose judgment you respect most — your board, your investors, your best salesperson, sometimes your own head at 2am.
A good opportunity and an on-path opportunity look identical until you have a sequence. With one, the inbound lead from the wrong industry is straightforward — it's a real opportunity arriving three steps early, and you can say exactly which three. Without one, every good opportunity is equally good, and "no" is just taste.
By the time you're past $1M you almost certainly have a view on which customers are best. The trouble is that a view isn't an order. You have probably never had to say what winning the first one has to produce before the second is worth starting.
A plan you've never put in order isn't a plan. It's a preference.
So the widening usually starts with you. Not because you decided badly — because there was no test it could fail.
Investors get nervous in a vacuum. When a founder can't lay out the sequence, the room fills the silence. With segments. Use cases. Partners. Introductions. Not because anyone has a better thesis, but because they don't have yours.
Two things push that advice in the same direction, and the direction is always wider.
Diversification is theirs, not yours. A wider surface area on one of thirty portfolio companies is a cheap option on upside. For you it's your whole company's attention for two quarters.
And TAM is a question about the end state, asked in a meeting about next quarter. "That segment's too small" measures your next step against your destination. The next step is the only one you can take. Narrow now is not narrow forever — it's how you get to wide.
And it's self-reinforcing. Widening produces countable activity. More logos, more pipeline, more partner names on a slide — all of it visible inside the quarter. Focus produces fewer wins of a better shape, which reads as a flatter chart for two or three quarters before it reads as anything at all.
You are being congratulated, in the room, for the thing that's costing you.
Nobody owns a gap
False Traction: The Evil Twin covered what drag looks like. This is where it comes from.
Every widening decision quietly puts two parts of your company on different speeds. Sales works a segment product isn't building for. Marketing casts wider than sales can convert. The roadmap carries four buyers who each want something different.
Sales is hitting its number. Product is shipping. Delivery is delivering.
Every function can be hitting its own target while the company spreads and stalls.
The fault isn't in any of the parts. It's in the gaps between them.
That has a name. Traction Drag™ — the drag that builds where effort should transfer between your moving parts and doesn't.
Engineering feels it first, and not as custom work. They feel it as an inability to rank anything.
Configurations, bug fixes, a feature build someone committed to in a deal, and a product gap for the segment you've just entered. Four kinds of work, all legitimate, each urgent to someone — and no single question that ranks them against each other.
That's what focus actually gives an engineering team: one yardstick.
Does this make us better for them?
Four segments means four yardsticks, which works out the same as none. So the queue gets ordered by whoever asked most recently or most loudly.
Product feels it as a roadmap of commitments rather than a plan — every item with a customer name attached, and no feature with a second customer.
And it feeds itself. Every win costs more than it should, margins thin, and you reach the end of the quarter behind the number — at which point a fast deal in a segment you don't serve stops looking like a distraction and starts looking like the answer.
So you widen again.
Those are this quarter's symptoms. They're expensive but they are not the bill.
What it costs at the category line
Every customer you take is a vote on your product. Not a suggestion — a vote, with a build attached. And the product you end up with is the sum of those votes.
The roadmap is where differentiation actually gets made. Not in the messaging. Not in the deck. What you build, for whom, over three years, is what you eventually are.
Which means the customers you accept are quietly deciding your positioning. Not the positioning you write down — the one you'll actually have.
There is no meeting where you agree to become a company that serves four segments adequately. It accumulates, one reasonable yes at a time, and you find out what you've become later.
Later is the part that costs.
Somewhere between $10M and $100M you stop competing for deals and start competing for the category. That contest is decided on whether the market can describe you in one line, whether you're the obvious choice for a particular kind of buyer, and whether your product is unmistakably better at one thing than everyone else's.
You enter that contest with what you built. Not with what you meant to build.
And the competitor across from you — the one who raised the same year you did — enters with theirs. If they spent those years accumulating deliberately, their product is sharp in one direction and yours is adequate in four.
That's the real bill for Traction Drag. Not the margin. Not the quarter. It's the starting position you take into the only contest that decides who leads the category — chosen for you, three years earlier, by customers you said yes to because the revenue was there.
The founder who had the answer
I worked with a founder who intuitively knew which customers to go after first, and roughly what came after that.
The instinct was right. It had just never been put in order, so outside his own head it didn't exist.
The well-meaning advice arrived the way it always does — in board meetings, one item at a time, from people who wanted the company to win. A customer. A partner. An introduction.
I want to be fair to the board. They weren't wrong to push, just nervous because nothing in front of them said this is the order, this is why. Set against that, a named customer in hand beats a direction nobody can see.
And that is the real cost of an order that only lives in your head. It isn't that you lose the argument. It's that without one, every opportunity has to be judged on its own merits, one at a time, as it arrives.
Judged on its own merits, every one of those is a yes.
So our work wasn't teaching him focus — he had that. It was working out what the first segment had to hand him before the second was worth starting: what it had to prove, the specific thing that would make a move into a new geography cheaper than going in cold.
Once that existed, the inbound lead wasn't a temptation to hold out against. It was a step out of order, and the reason was already on the page.
The spread stopped and the line held.
Focus isn't discipline. It's what's left over once the order is decided.
So — what to stop
Four things, heaviest cost first.
Stop letting revenue write the roadmap. Every deal that requires a build borrows against a company you haven't decided to become. Some are worth the borrowing. Most are Scale Debt arriving disguised as good news.
Stop treating additions as tests. A test has a hypothesis, an end date, and a decision attached. Almost everything called a test at this stage is an addition with optimistic language on it — and most of them start with "let's just explore it." If there's no date on which you'd stop, you didn't test anything.
Stop counting activity that isn't shaped like your last good win. If it doesn't look like the wins that repeat, it isn't pipeline. It's optionality, and optionality is expensive to hold.
Stop making the decision in the room. A board meeting is where a decision gets tested, not where it gets made. Work the order out live and you'll take whichever idea sounded best on the day — a decision you outsourced by not making it earlier.
Those are the stops. Here is the thing they make room for.
If you had to write the order down right now — first, then, then, with a because between each — how far would you get?
Most get to the second step and stop.
If you're a founder in the middle of this, the rest of it can be in your inbox.
Subscribers get the thinking that doesn't make it onto LinkedIn. In this issue that's what a Traction Sequence actually is — not a plan, not your go-to-market strategy, you almost certainly have both — and the five questions that turn a list into a sequence.
Most founders can answer two of them.
It also covers what having one actually buys you, and in what order: repeatability, then predictability, then expansion. In that order, and not before.
Next in this series: what it actually takes to get through the Traction stage — the three things that have to be true, in order, and why the order isn't negotiable.
#InstinctiveSpread #TractionDrag #CompoundingProgress #TractionSequence #CategoryLeadership #Scaleup
Josephine Too is the founder of Sofos Advisory, helping innovation-led founders fix the right thing for their stage, so growth holds through each transition and builds toward category leadership.
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