Momentum is intoxicating.
A product catches on, revenue ticks up, new customers arrive. Inside the company, everything feels different: the air is lighter, the team moves faster, even small wins get magnified into signs of destiny. The story writes itself — we’re growing, because we deserve to be.
But momentum is fragile. It doesn’t always come from the strength of the engine. Sometimes it’s just a gust of tailwind. A new platform channel, a sudden shift in consumer behavior, an investor-fueled spending spree. From the inside, it feels like genius. From the outside, it often looks like timing.
Think about Clubhouse in 2020. It wasn’t product-market fit so much as pandemic-market fit. People were trapped indoors, hungry for social interaction, and Clubhouse was in the right place at the right time. Momentum looked unstoppable. But when the tailwind faded — when people returned to normal life, when competitors copied features — the “growth” vanished.
Or consider Zoom. It had good fundamentals long before COVID, but what made it ubiquitous wasn’t just superior technology. It was a once-in-a-generation event that shoved the entire world online. Zoom grew faster than anyone thought possible, but the company also spent the next three years wrestling with the reality that a lot of that growth wasn’t permanent.
Even in enterprise SaaS, you see the same pattern. The 2021 boom in valuations and growth rates wasn’t entirely the result of better products or stronger business models. It was fueled by capital — cheap money sloshing around, pushing companies to scale faster than was sustainable. Many of those same companies are now cutting staff, pulling back on expansion, and realizing the “growth” was more financial wind than operational strength.
The danger isn’t in catching a lucky break. The danger is in believing the break was skill. Teams start to build capacity for a future that was never guaranteed. They scale hiring, expand offices, raise expectations. By the time the tailwind dies down, the overhead is permanent but the growth isn’t.
This is why so many companies rise quickly and stall. They mistake borrowed momentum for earned growth. They act as if they’ve built a flywheel when all they’ve done is catch a wave.
True growth feels slower than you want it to. It comes not from a single tailwind but from compounding — from systems that keep working even when luck fades. The great companies aren’t the ones who catch the biggest gusts. They’re the ones who can still move forward when the wind dies.
Momentum is real, but it’s also an illusion. The edge between the two is thin, and most companies don’t realize they’ve crossed it until it’s too late.