Going Parabolic
How to achieve sustainable, rapid growth of new ventures
Rapid growth.
Extraordinary upward movement.
Classic J-curve style growth.
Those are all characteristics of going parabolic in the business world.
Within three months of launching, ai-powered development platform, Lovable went parabolic and had already hit $17M in an annual recurring revenue (ARR).
That’s parabolic growth.
The best businesses are able to sustain that growth. Companies like Tesla or Nvidia, even though they have hit their own share of bumps.
Others fail to sustain the promising growth they once showed.
For example, the list of closed artificial intelligence (AI) companies on Crunchbase numbers over 2,820. And, it bares some well-known names.
Builder.ai announced it was insolvent just this month, May 2025. The company was valued at over $1B and had raised more than $450M from investors, including Microsoft.
There is such a thing as going negatively parabolic, and that is what Builder.ai is experiencing.
Experiencing Parabolic Growth
I’ve been lucky to experience parabolic growth a few times in my career.
The first time was as a first-time founder. My startup, GoGrabLunch, struck a chord with people and before we knew it we had members in 45 countries.
I’ll never forget my CTO calling me and asking if I spoke Spanish.
Me: “Well, I took five years of it, so I can read it ok.”
CTO: “Ok, can you see what you can make of the newspaper article I just sent you? It’s from the Peruvian national newspaper and…well, I think we made the front page.”
The next thing we knew we had a viral sign-up event going on in Lima, Peru.
Experiencing parabolic growth isn’t always a good thing. Like I said earlier, that level of growth can be positive or negative. In our case it was negative, because we weren’t prepared.
Fortunately, I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Here are some ways you can avoid learning them the hard way.
How to Sustain Parabolic Growth
Parabolic growth requires a multifaceted approach. One that combines a Goldilocks, i.e. just right, level of focus on your market, relentless attention to your ICP, building the right product, pricing strategies that both maintain margin for growth while making the buying decision easy, and financial strategies that give you plenty of runway.
Let’s look at some best practices that I’ve picked up in each of those areas as someone who has launched $300M worth of products. Some of these could be counterintuitive.
Your market
Study Why Not: What target market isn’t a candidate for your product, and why? Sometimes learning why a market isn’t a fit is just as valuable as studying a market that is a fit. We did this with one of our fintech products, where we thought the market was one group, but by asking ourselves “why not” we uncovered an even better market.
Study Behaviors, Not Opinions: Who cares what a customer says? Focus more on what they do than what they say.
Your ICP
Study your Rejectors: Knowing your ICP intimately is critical to knowing where and how to market to them. It’s just as important to study your rejectors, the prospects who didn’t convert. Why didn’t they convert? Were they the wrong ICP to target in the first place? Was there a specific deal-breaker that cost you the business? Taking this approach could help you uncover unmet needs that are key to your product’s success, or, at the worst, open up new product opportunities.
Study Churn: Forget success stories. Study where your product failed to keep a paying customer happy. Was the value proposition that won you the business something you weren’t able to live up to? Or, maybe, hopefully not, you misrepresented your product’s value proposition. Is there something you could do, have done, to save them as a customer?
Your product
Study Customer Hacks: Are you customers using your product in ways that you didn’t account for? Are they creating their own workarounds to solve pain points?
Study Ethnographics: Look beyond just the context of your product. What are the habits, routines, influences that impact how customers use your product that won’t show up in normal user research?
Your pricing
Study the Bookends: A lot of best practices revolve around measuring the mean/median/average of KPIs. With pricing, I like to study the bookends. Did raising pricing significantly drive customers away enough to offset total revenue? Did lowering prices increase sales volume as expected?
Study Outcomes: I love outcome-based pricing. It forces you to put your money, not your customer’s money, where you mouth is. Your product’s pricing should reflect the value of the outcome you can help the customer achieve. Think about it like this, why would a customer ever, I mean ever, churn if they see more than enough value for the price they pay? They wouldn’t. Unless the are literally out of money.
Your money
Overinvest in Staff: Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines once told his Board of Directors that employees came before shareholders. Having the right staff is a force-multiplier for growth. Having the wrong staff will crush a business. Overpaying for the wrong staff isn’t a function of bad compensation structures. It’s a function of bad HR/hiring practices.
Overinvest in Intel: Parabolic growth isn’t possible if you can’t make data-driven decisions because you a) don’t have the right data; b) don’t have the right processes to help you capture data; c) don’t have the right products to help you parse the data.
These may sound/feel counterintuitive. I’ve made a career about of going against norms. What I’ve learned is that it’s not always the know best practices that make a difference in the business. Sometimes, its the edge cases or the little-used techniques that make the biggest difference.
Your Turn to Go Parabolic
Reaching parabolic growth isn’t always a straight-line. Sometimes you try things and they don’t work out. Remember, a lot of what has worked for other people is a matter of experimentation.
As important as some of these tactics are, its just as important that you are prepared for if/when your venture experiences rapid growth. That is where we failed with GoGrabLunch.
Next time, we will talk about how to be prepared for parabolic growth and the steps you can take to ensure its sustainable.