Why Growth Can Be a Leading Indicator of Failure

We thought a year of runway was enough. What we learned was selling to SMBs proved just as brutal as enterprise, only the revenue didn’t scale.

My startup Forewards started as an idea to make referral marketing effortless for small e-commerce businesses. Shopify and BigCommerce merchants could answer a few questions, and our algorithm would spit out multi-touch campaigns. Everything from copy, design, sequence, it was all created automatically. It almost felt like magic.

It worked… for some. The merchants that stuck were loyal. But most churned early, not because the product failed, but because it never became core to their business. SMBs are survival-first: if it’s not core to keeping the lights on, it’s expendable. Referral campaigns, nice as they were, regardless of how effective, often didn’t make the cut.

At the same time, we were still running a successful digital marketing agency, which contributed the majority of our revenue. When we won a company growth award, it felt like proof we were on the right track. Internally, we knew the SaaS side was just starting to grow, but the award validated the blended entity. It was awesome.

Then reality hit. Losing another large agency client drained our cash flow. Forewards on its own couldn’t sustain us. Worse, investors weren’t convinced. Without explosive growth or must-have metrics, the software wasn’t a standalone story. So we shut it down while we could.

The two lessons we carried away:

1. We overestimated how quickly SaaS could stand on its own. Running a product under the shadow of a services business gives a false sense of security.
2. We built something that wasn’t existential for SMBs. Nice-to-have doesn’t pay the bills, no matter how magical the algorithm.

Growth awards feel like validation, but they aren’t awards for resilience. Scale and substance are different things.