Outside forces (mostly beyond your control):
- A crowded market: too many competitors chasing the same customers, which pushes prices down and drives up what it costs to win each one.
- Customers who hold the power: when a handful of big buyers, or highly price-sensitive ones, can dictate terms and cap what you can charge.
- Suppliers or platforms that hold the power: when the vendors or platforms you depend on take the margin, or can change the rules on you overnight.
- Barriers to entry: if your edge is easy to replicate, fast-followers pile in and erode it. Recent advances in AI/LLM software development tooling have nearly eliminated the cost-resource barrier for fast-follower copycats of software-only solutions.
- A different way to solve the same problem: customers meeting the same need with an alternative (chat instead of email, video calls instead of travel).
- Shifts you can’t control: interest rates, the funding climate, AI/LLMs, and data regulation, or a platform quietly changing its policy.
Internal frictions (within your control, and often the real problem for startups):
- Weak product-market fit: the number one startup killer; growth spend poured into a leaky bucket. AI/LLM coding tools have spawned a massive “vibe-coder” community who are creating products and seeking investor financing before they do any product-market fit due-diligence.
- Broken unit/customer economics: it costs more to win a customer than they’re worth, margins are negative, or payback takes longer than your runway (Homejoy, MoviePass).
- Scaling too early: hiring, expanding, or spending ahead of a repeatable, proven motion.
- Talent concentration: critical knowledge trapped in a few people who can walk out the door.
- Too little fuel, or too much: under-capitalization stalls you; over-capitalization hides a broken model until it’s expensive (WeWork).
- Refusing to diagnose honestly: Boardman, Vining & Shapiro call the honest-assessment step the “fulcrum,” and note it’s exactly where teams are most likely to fall off. Many startups never name their real constraint.
Work with Authgnosis
Reading about the six drivers is one thing; diagnosing your own company against them is another.
I’ve turned this entire framework into a working intake tool: a Growth Diagnostic Checklist, a section-by-section guide covering all six drivers plus the talent layer and the honest “fulcrum” assessment. It’s the exact prerequisite information needed to map a company’s current state, growth strategy, and future state, and to name the one or two moves that will actually compound.
If you’d rather me do the work to collect that information and put it into a high-level assessment, let me know.
Get the Authgnosis Growth Diagnostic Checklist
The full section-by-section diagnostic, free.
Citations
Framework foundation: Anthony E. Boardman, Aidan R. Vining & Daniel Shapiro, “A Framework for Comprehensive Strategic Analysis” (2003).
Professional-service-firm lens: Andrew von Nordenflycht, “What Is a Professional Service Firm? Toward a Theory and Taxonomy of Knowledge-Intensive Firms,” Academy of Management Review 35(1), 2010.
Canadian funding figures: SR&ED enhanced expenditure limit per Budget 2025; NRC-IRAP 2025–26 contributions. Real-world examples drawn from public reporting.