Constraint-Driven Growth
“We just need more budget to scale.” This is the most expensive assumption in UA. Diagnose before you spend.
The Problem
I’ve watched teams triple their spend and barely move the needle. Not because their campaigns were bad. Because they were scaling the wrong thing.
Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints says something uncomfortable: improving anything that isn’t your primary constraint doesn’t improve overall results.
You can 10x your creative output. But if your funnel leaks, it doesn’t matter. You can double your budget. But if creative fatigue is killing you, more spend accelerates the death spiral. You can hire more people. But if your processes are broken, you’re scaling chaos.
The Four Constraint Categories
Every growth blocker falls into one of four categories. Only one is your primary constraint at any given time — fixing the others doesn’t unlock growth until you fix the constraint.
Creative Constraints
Your ads are tired. Audiences are saturated. CTR is decaying. No amount of budget fixes exhausted creative.
Signals: Top creative >60 days old, CTR declining 20%+, fewer than 5 active concepts
Funnel Constraints
You're buying installs, but they're leaking out at registration, trial, or payment. The bucket has holes.
Signals: Install-to-register <50%, trial conversion dropping, onboarding completion <30%
Channel Constraints
You're over-indexed on one channel. Or you've saturated your current audience. The well is running dry.
Signals: >70% spend on single channel, CPIs rising despite optimization, frequency >3x/week
Operations Constraints
Your team is at capacity. Creative production is slow. Data is delayed. You can't scale what you can't manage.
Signals: Creative turnaround >5 days, reporting delayed 48h+, team at 100% utilization
Diagnosis in Practice
Consider a meditation app hitting a wall: $500K/month budget, CPI up 40% in 6 months, leadership pushing for growth. The surface story: “We need more budget to compete.”
Creative Health Check: Top creative 94 days old. CTR down 28% over 60 days. Only 2 active concepts.
Funnel Check: Install-to-trial 12% (industry avg 15%). Onboarding completion 67%. Within range.
Channel Check: 82% Meta, 18% Google. High concentration but neither saturated.
Ops Check: 3-person team, 5-day creative turnaround. Manageable.
Diagnosis: Creative constraint. Two 94-day-old concepts are doing all the work. The team doesn’t need more budget — they need 8-10 genuinely new concepts before spending another dollar on scale.
Without the constraint diagnosis, they would have tripled spend on exhausted creative. The constraint framework saved them from scaling their biggest weakness.
The Tool
Constraint Finder
Answer 12 diagnostic questions to identify whether creative, funnel, channel, or ops constraints are holding back your growth.
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