The Trap of Measurable Success

Every D2C or Infoproduct company story starts in almost the same way.
You stumble onto something that works — an offer, an ad, a moment.
Numbers explode upward. Everyone feels ecstatic.
Finally, you’re in the big league.

And that’s the moment when a new set of problems begins.

You need to explain what just happened — to yourself, your team, your investors.
You can’t admit it was luck, timing, or some unmeasurable thing. It was all you, wasn’t it?

So you reach for what sounds most rational: the numbers.
They turn chaos into story, accident into strategy.

The First High

You start measuring what everyone measures — ROAS, MER, revenue, spend.
They feel objective, solid, true.

The numbers become a mirror for your identity.
You’re “the brand doing seven figures.”
You’re “the agency with X million under management.”

Growth validates belief.
It turns story into evidence.

But hidden in that confidence is a new kind of risk — the kind that only appears after success.

What’s Measurable Begins to Rule

The thing about measurable progress is that it dominates everything else.
What’s visible — revenue, ROAS, spend — starts defining what’s valuable.
And what’s not visible — complexity, fragility, optionality — fades out of sight.

What got you there becomes less important than what’s happening now.

We are data-driven, right?

At small scale, metrics help you find signal.
At large scale, they replace meaning with measurement.

The first customer complaint is a tragedy you fix immediately. A 2% refund rate is just a metric that tells you how to adjust your CAC.
Stalin had an even better comparison for this.

You think you’re managing the business.
You’re managing the proxies.

When Numbers Become Commitments

The irony of growth is that it locks you in.
Scaling means placing bets that don’t go away easily — inventory, payroll, leases, logistics.

Each dollar of growth buys not just freedom, but commitment — and acceptance of inertia.

What guided you at thousands in revenue imprisons you at millions.

You’re locking yourself into a set of commitments that can end up costing you your time, people, reputation, and, in the end, your sanity.

The Expansion of Fragility

Every metric that looks good hides a new type of debt — one you ignore until you can’t.

Every dashboard is green.
The whole team is within their KPIs.
And yet you’re losing sleep over the next inventory order, factory delay, or ad account that just got shut down.

The systems quietly fracture.
You grow faster than you understand what you’ve built.

The Moment of Fog

Then the numbers stop moving the way they used to.
ROAS isn’t what it was.
Your organization feels more bureaucratic than you recognize.

Because remember: when things were great, everyone rushed to claim credit.
When things go south, it’s no one’s fault.

You keep testing, spending, optimizing — but every new try feels duller.
The clarity that once guided you turns into frustration.

And when you try to navigate out, you look to the same thing that got you here — metrics.

You refresh dashboards like a madman, searching for direction, not realizing you’ve confused the map for the territory.

The Unseen Shift

Rory Sutherland once told a story about Eurostar.
Faced with complaints about slow trains between London and Paris, engineers proposed a £6 billion plan to cut the journey time by 40 minutes.
Sutherland suggested something heretical — spend 10 % of that on Wi-Fi, better seats, and good wine.
The trip wouldn’t be faster, but it would feel better.
The “problem” wasn’t speed — it was boredom.

That’s the paradox: metrics could measure speed perfectly, but they could never detect boredom.
They worked only within the boundary of what had been defined as “the problem.”
And that’s exactly how most businesses think about growth.

When a D2C brand hits success, it begins solving everything with metrics.
Revenue down? Adjust ROAS.
MER slipped? Cut spend.

But metrics can only describe what’s already known.
They operate inside the model — not outside it.

The moment your business interacts with customers, new functions appear — new meanings, new perceptions, new value pathways that didn’t exist before.
No dashboard can predict them because they emerge from human context, not arithmetic.
Metrics see the “train,” not the “journey.”

Where I First Saw It

The safest advice I could give to any brand owner I’ve ever met was always: work on your creatives.

I say “safest” because advice is cheap and acting on it is expensive — and I’m not arrogant enough to pretend that what worked for one complex system will work for yours.

Ads are the cheapest way to stumble onto a solution, mainly because they move the conversation from you-and-the-dashboard to ad-and-customer.

You’re shifting focus from lagging to leading metrics.

What people often confuse is this: they think ROAS, LTV, MER, and CM are leading indicators.
They’re not. They’re lagging — they tell you what already happened.

Number of ads tested? Angles explored? Stories told? Those are leading.
They create optionality before the numbers move.

One ad reframed the product from a tool to a shortcut.
Another shifted the story from saving time to feeling in control.
he numbers moved because meaning moved first.

Ads are probably the easiest lever for optionality in D2C — not the only one, but the one you can pull tomorrow without restructuring your entire operation.
Small bets. Quick feedback. No lock-in.

There’s a whole other conversation about how you decide what to test — what you bet against so you can actually read those leading metrics.
But that’s for another time.

The point is: metrics aren’t useless.
But they impose a self-regulated prison on our vision if we accept them as the ultimate source of truth.

They make you forget that optionality is your only real protection in a complex system.

When you’re stuck looking at dashboards, go make an ad instead.
t’s the fastest way back to looking at customers.