Why Best Practices Are Killing Your Growth

The Interview Trap

Here’s the most dangerous form of “best practices”: founder interviews.

Someone interviews a successful founder. The founder shares what worked, what didn’t, and how they think about growth. They’re being helpful. They’re being honest.

And founders watching get influenced.

Not in a subtle way. In an immediate, “I need to do this” way. They extract the framework, break it into execution steps, and start building.

If they’re lucky, it fails fast. They learn quickly that the tactic doesn’t translate.

If they’re unlucky, something worse happens: slow realization. The tactic sort of works, or seems like it might work, so they keep going. Weeks turn into months. And along the way, they start moving the goalpost.

The Goalpost Problem

Here’s how goalpost-moving kills you.

You run a campaign to drive signups. You’re tracking a specific conversion rate over a specific period. Traffic comes. You see drop-offs on the landing page.

Instead of diagnosing WHY people are dropping off, you panic. You doubt your pricing. So you lower it.

Here’s the thing: changing your pricing is itself an experiment. It needs its own hypothesis, its own metrics, its own diagnosis. But you just threw it into the middle of another campaign because something wasn’t working.

Now you’ve messed up two things. You don’t know if the original campaign failed because of targeting, messaging, or timing. And you don’t know if lower pricing will even solve the drop-off, because the problem might not have been pricing at all.

The problem might have been that you were targeting a broad user base instead of your super consumers. But you’ll never know now, because you changed the goalpost.

Why the Same Tactic Fails for You

Here’s a number: 8 out of 10 tactics that work for Company A will fail for Company B.

Why? Context.

And the most important context? The founder.

A startup is a direct reflection of the founder. If the founder is different, the company is different. The product, the market timing, the messaging, the network, the skills, the way decisions get made, all of it changes.

We’ve looked at two clothing companies with nearly identical messaging and the same target audience. One is growing. The other has been stagnant for six months. Same playbook. Completely different results.

The difference? One of them actually identified their super consumers. The other is still targeting a broad user base and wondering why nothing sticks.

When you copy a tactic from a founder interview, you’re copying the visible parts, the framework, the steps. But you’re not copying their context. You can’t. Their context is them.

Most growth advice is tactics in the wrong war. You’re fighting a different battle with someone else’s weapons.

The Agency Trap

There’s another “best practice” that backfires: hiring specialized agencies early.

The logic sounds smart. “I’m not an expert in paid ads, so I’ll hire an agency that is.” You bring in specialists to run your campaigns.

Here’s the problem: agencies are executors, not diagnosticians.

A great agency will take your brief and execute it brilliantly. They’ll optimize the mechanics, run the tests, and deliver reports. But they’re executing YOUR strategy. And if you don’t have clarity on your super consumers, your positioning, or your messaging, they’re just executing a flawed strategy faster.

Some agencies push back. But there’s only so much they can push. They’re chasing revenue. They want the client.

So the campaign runs. It underperforms. And here’s what the founder concludes:

“They weren’t the right agency. They didn’t know their game well. This is all I can get for so much money. If I spend more, I’ll probably get a better one.”

Sound familiar?

The founder blames the tactic, the agency, instead of diagnosing the real problem: they didn’t have clarity before they started executing. And the cycle repeats with a more expensive agency.

The Real Cost (Including the One You Can’t See)

The obvious costs are money and time. But those aren’t the worst of it.

Here’s the cost that really hurts: you’re burning first impressions with super consumers.

Your potential best customers see your unfocused campaigns, your confused messaging, your “we’re for everyone” positioning. And they move on. They decide you’re not their kind of brand.

Here’s the brutal part: you will never know this happened.

There’s no dashboard that shows “super consumer lost.” No metric that flags “this person would have been your best customer, but they bounced because your targeting was off.” They just… disappear into your broad audience numbers. One anonymous drop-off among thousands.

Super consumers don’t come back for a second look. If the first impression says “this isn’t for me,” they’re gone, and you’ll never know they were there.

Quick Test: Are You Stuck in the Best Practices Trap?

Not sure if this is you? Here’s how to tell:

[ ] You’re running a “best practice” tactic, but results are wildly inconsistent, some weeks up, some weeks way down, no clear pattern
[ ] You can trace your current strategy back to a founder interview, blog post, or case study you consumed
[ ] You’ve changed your pricing, messaging, or targeting mid-campaign because “something wasn’t working”
[ ] You’ve hired (or fired) an agency in the last 6 months and blamed them for underperformance
[ ] You’re not seeing steady 10% week-on-week improvement from any single initiative

If you checked 2 or more, you’re in the trap.

The Alternative: Think Differently, Experiment Deliberately

If copying best practices is the trap, what’s the alternative?

First: don’t copy. When you see a tactic that worked for someone else, resist the urge to extract and execute.

Instead, derive a tailored experiment. Ask: How would I test whether this works for MY situation, with MY audience, in MY context?

Come up with a small experiment. Run it. Learn from it. See if it makes sense before you scale it.

But here’s the golden rule: never change the goalpost.

Pick your metric. Define what success looks like. Run the experiment. If it doesn’t work, that’s data. But don’t panic-adjust in the middle. Don’t lower your pricing because signups are slow. Don’t switch channels because day three didn’t show results.

Experiments require discipline. The moment you start moving the goalpost, you stop learning.

The Takeaway

If you’ve been following best practices for months and nothing’s working, here’s what to do this week:

Pick one thing. Break it into a small set of experiments.

If you haven’t identified your super consumers yet, that’s your first experiment. Go find them. Talk to them. Understand them deeply enough that you can predict what will resonate. And knowing your super consumers doesn’t mean demographics, it means specific, surprising insights you can only learn from real conversations.

If you already know your super consumers, run small experiments designed for compounding growth. Set a target, 10% week-on-week improvement is a good rule of thumb. It’s not a magic number, but it’s measurable, and measurable beats vague.

Stack the learnings. Let each experiment inform the next.

And whatever you do, stop copying tactics from interviews. Those founders are sharing what worked for them, in their context, with their audience, as the founders they are.

You’re not them. Run your own experiments.

This is what we do at Idea Labz. We don’t hand you a playbook from someone else’s interview, we run Experiment Cycles to discover what actually works for YOU.