On the Risk of Making Money the Goal — The Paradox of Chasing It Further Away

The previous post looked at the risk of an organization scattering in different directions when its vision is never made explicit. But having a vision doesn’t make you safe either. What happens more often is that the vision is genuinely there, and money still quietly slides into the seat it was supposed to occupy.

The Paradox of Chasing It Further Away

An organization that makes money its goal actually moves fast at first. This month’s revenue target, this quarter’s net new revenue, a conversion rate expressed as a percentage — numeric goals are clear and measurable, so it’s easy for everyone to align around them. You run promotions, adjust pricing, push upsells harder. And the numbers really do go up.

The trouble comes after. Users who’ve grown used to promotions stop responding to full price. Upsells pushed too aggressively drag the churn rate up right alongside them. You’ve essentially borrowed against next month’s trust to fill this month’s revenue line. Six months, a year later, you find yourself hitting the revenue target every single time while the company’s underlying health keeps getting weaker. You chased the money, and it kept getting further away.

The pattern comes through more clearly in a concrete case. One subscription startup, trying to hit its quarterly revenue target, kept issuing steep discount codes to new signups every month. New revenue beat the target every time, but a structure quietly took hold underneath it: nobody renewed without a discount. A few quarters later, when the discounts were pulled, revenue was cut in half almost overnight — completely disconnected from that streak of target-beating months.

Machiavelli’s View: Wealth as a Byproduct, Not a Goal

In The Prince, Machiavelli warns against a ruler squeezing wealth out of his people too aggressively. Heavy taxation born of a thin treasury breeds resentment, and resentment is the seed of rebellion. The healthy treasury he does endorse is one that accumulates naturally as a byproduct of protecting the people and stabilizing the state. Wealth was never the prince’s goal in itself — it was the means, and the result, of some other goal: stability and defense.

The same distinction applies directly to startups. Revenue can’t be the goal. Revenue is the result of a user feeling that a real problem got solved, and paying for it. Reverse that order — aim directly at the result called revenue — and you start making decisions that neglect or damage the very thing that produces that result: the quality of the problem you’re solving.

What Gets Distorted

The first thing to warp when money becomes the goal is priority. Fixing the small but fundamental friction users run into constantly loses out, every time, to whatever ships revenue right now — an extra checkout step, a pricing overhaul, a promo banner. Any single one of these calls isn’t a big deal. Repeated often enough, the product slowly tilts away from the user and toward the revenue chart.

There’s a distortion especially common among startups preparing to raise their next round. To make the metrics look good for that round, a business model with genuinely weak retention gets dressed up using revenue numbers alone. The chart you show investors trends up and to the right, but underneath it is a structure that’s simply refilling churned users with new acquisition, over and over. That structure always surfaces eventually — usually at the exact moment the company is least equipped to handle it.

The same distortion shows up at the customer-facing edge too. To hit this quarter’s numbers, it’s common to cut support staff or tighten the refund policy. Costs drop and the P&L looks better right away, but customers who walk away disappointed from that decision quietly leave at their next renewal instead. Churn is a cost that’s invisible at the moment the decision gets made, so what actually got sacrificed only shows up much later.

Proxy Metrics and Real Metrics

Avoiding this distortion requires being clear about what to watch instead of revenue. Since revenue is the result, you need to track the metrics on the cause side that actually produce it — things like how often a user comes back after a specific problem gets solved, how much repeat purchase happens without any prompting, how long it takes a new user to reach the core value on their first use. If revenue is climbing while these cause-side metrics stay flat, that’s a signal the revenue growth won’t last.

Healthy organizations set revenue targets by first defining which cause-side improvement that revenue is supposed to come from. Not “grow revenue 20% this quarter,” but “raise the reuse rate of our core feature by 15 points, and let revenue growth follow from that.” Once that order is made explicit, it also becomes obvious what to check when revenue doesn’t move.

Money Follows

The conclusion is simple. The goal always has to be “what problem are we solving,” and money has to be the result that follows when that’s done well. An organization that keeps this order intact knows exactly what to fix when revenue wobbles — go back to the problem. An organization that has made money the goal tends to respond to the same wobble with a harder promotion, a more aggressive upsell. The same prescription that grew the disease in the first place.

This is exactly where the vision from the previous post matters again. If “the problem we solve” is concretely inscribed across the whole organization, you have a standard to notice — and reverse — the moment revenue tries to quietly take the goal’s seat.

The next post takes up another kind of false foundation: a business run entirely on one person’s relationships, where the founder’s network has become the whole revenue structure.