When Every Sale Feels Uphill: The Physics of Manufactured DemandHow to recognize the hidden force that keeps startups stuck—no matter how good the product is.
There’s a moment in every founder’s journey where the work stops feeling like progress and starts feeling like resistance. You can’t quite explain it. Nothing is “wrong,” but nothing is flowing either. You’re waking up earlier, pushing harder, refining the pitch deck, tightening your product, adjusting your ICP, rewriting messaging, and doing everything experts say founders should do. And yet every sale still feels like climbing a hill with sandbags tied to your ankles. Some conversations take heroics. And deep down, beneath the optimism and the hustle, you feel something you can’t ignore: This shouldn’t require this much force. It’s not burnout. It’s a physics problem. Because in early-stage markets, demand behaves like gravity. When the market wants what you’re building, you feel a subtle acceleration in everything: in energy, in clarity, in referrals, in conversations, in inbound momentum. Buyers lean forward. Doors open with less strain. People finish your sentences. They repeat your narrative back to you.
But when the market doesn’t want what you’re building—even if you’ve built something genuinely valuable—you feel drag. Heavy, exhausting, soul-draining drag. The dangerous part? That’s why we’re going to explore demand drag—not as five checklist items, but as a single, continuous force expressed through five distinct founder experiences. Each one corresponds to a stage in the revenue-validation ladder of Pricing Before Product (your uploaded document), but instead of writing them as steps, we’ll track them as sensations, patterns, and physics you can feel in real time. Because the market always speaks first through sentiment, not spreadsheets. The earliest drag: when enthusiasm masks the absence of energyDrag begins quietly. It’s the phase where everyone loves your idea, admires your insight, compliments your clarity… but no one commits. You’re having conversations that feel positive but don’t move. You walk out of meetings energized by interest but empty-handed on action. Everyone is cheering. This is the earliest sign of manufactured demand: You’re the one outlining the problem. And if you stop talking, the interest stops existing. False positives at this stage set the slope of the entire mountain. Drag begins as politeness. And because nothing structurally contradicts your narrative yet, you climb higher, building more, investing more, believing more. You don’t know it yet, but the hill has already formed. The drag of intent: when people want the outcome but won’t take the first stepAs you move from idea to something testable—maybe a manual service, a hand-built prototype, a concierge MVP—you start to encounter a deeper form of resistance. People love the concept. But when you ask them to try the manual version next week, suddenly:
This is the drag of intent without initiative. It’s not that people don’t care. You’re still supplying 100% of the activation energy required to start anything. If you stopped initiating trials, demos, or follow-ups for even two weeks, progress would grind to a halt. This phase is deceptive because it feels like you’re close. When the market wants something, they take initiative. The difference reveals the slope you’re on. The drag of misalignment: when the product exists but gravity doesn’tNow you have an MVP. Something that works. Something you can show. This is the stage founders dream of—the moment where “the product speaks for itself.” Except often, it doesn’t. Instead, you begin to experience friction around meaning, positioning, and interpretation. You demo the product and prospects say:
But they struggle to see where it fits into their workflow. They don’t instantly connect the dots between your product’s capabilities and their own priorities. You find yourself:
That’s misalignment drag—the drag of pulling comprehension uphill. Your product may solve a problem, but if customers don’t naturally feel the pain at the intensity you assumed, you end up pushing people toward an insight they don’t yet have. This is the moment every founder must face the brutal distinction between solving something real and solving something important. MVP drag is the drag of trying to convince the market to care. The drag of conversion: when users are active, but customers are absentUsage is one of the most dangerous early signals because it feels like momentum. People are logging in. But when you move from:
everything changes. Suddenly, they become budget-constrained, timeline-constrained, priority-constrained. Rejections shift from:
This is the drag of behavior without belief. Users are willing to exert effort, but not allocate resources. They want the benefit until it costs them something. They perceive value but not urgency. When usage doesn’t evolve into revenue, the slope sharpens. Founders rationalize it as:
But beneath these justifications is a harder truth: Conversion drag is the drag of transforming habit into necessity. The drag of momentum: when your early successes don’t replicateThis is the deepest and most disorienting drag of all. You have paying customers. Maybe a few dozen. Maybe a few hundred. Enough to believe you’re onto something. Enough to show early traction. Enough to raise money or build a team. But now comes the core test of demand pull: Does your success replicate? Do new customers convert at the same rate as early ones? If the answer is no, you have reached the stage of non-propagating demand. Your early buyers were outliers—people whose pain was unusually strong, whose motivations were unusually aligned, or whose context made them unusually willing to take a bet on something new. You mistake outliers for a market. From here, every sale becomes disproportionately heavy because every sale is a new origin story. There is no compounding. No acceleration. No shared language. No “network effect” of narrative. This is the moment where drag becomes existential. Momentum drag is the final expression of manufactured demand. Drag is not a signal of failure — it is a signal of misalignmentManufactured demand does not mean you’re wrong. Drag is not a verdict. A message that says:
The market has to participate. The presence of drag means you’re relying on effort where you need gravity. How to know when gravity existsHere’s the simplest test: If you stopped selling for 30 days, would anything—anything—still move? Would:
If nothing moves without you, you’re not feeling gravity—you’re creating it manually. But if even a few things move on their own—small pulls, subtle nudges, quiet signals—you’ve hit something real. Because demand pull doesn’t look like rocketship growth at the beginning. Pull is not loud. When the market wants something, you don’t have to keep explaining why they should. The founder’s real job: to search for gravity, not manufacture itThe mistake founders make is believing their job is to create demand. It isn’t. Your job is to find where that gravity already lives. Because when you’re in the right market, solving the right problem, with the right pain narrative, you feel the slope reverse. Your work is still hard. The physics shift. The slope changes. You move from carrying everything uphill That is the difference between manufactured demand and validated demand. And it is the single inflection point that determines whether a startup endures, or exhausts itself dragging a market that never asked to be moved.
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Sunday, November 23, 2025
When Every Sale Feels Uphill: The Physics of Manufactured Demand
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Borrowed Traction: When Funding Becomes a Channel
For most of startup history, the gospel is clear: traction earns funding. Today, in a world drowning in distrust, funding itself has become a channel. A term sheet from a credible investor is no longer just capital — it’s a signal. Users, partners, and talent think: If a well-known name believes it, it must work. Funding becomes traction. The Psychology of Borrowed CredibilityBehavioral economists call this signaling theory — when people lack complete information, they follow the judgments of those who seem informed. In the startup world, investors play the role of reputational filters. That belief travels fast:
It’s social proof at venture scale — borrowed traction through borrowed trust. But every signal decays. When Funding Really Is the First ChannelIn certain categories, this inversion is not a vanity move; it’s physics. OpenAI exemplifies this. In India, Ather Energy needed more than chemistry labs; it needed consumers to believe electric scooters could survive Indian roads. Agnikul Cosmos, a Chennai-based space-tech startup, used its ISRO MoU and government grants the same way. In all these cases, funding functioned as the first marketing channel — the prototype before the product. Investor as DistributionStrategic investors convert belief into bandwidth. That access loop is traction. Notion grew that way. In another instance, an investor builds a portfolio flywheels — SaaS founders cross-selling into each other’s customer bases, sharing talent, even swapping playbooks. The investor wasn’t just capital; it was channel architecture. The Fragility of Borrowed TractionThe same dynamics that accelerate early growth can collapse under their own weight. Clubhouse is the cautionary example. Investor logos filled slides; empty rooms filled calendars. Borrowed traction works until the spotlight moves on. The Half-Life of AttentionBorrowed attention behaves like radioactive decay — intense at first, then half as bright every few months. Roughly six months after a funding or grant announcement, inbound interest, media coverage, and talent flow all decline sharply. Investors turn to the next shiny story. Funding is a spark; traction must become the fuel. Grants as Proof, Not PublicityIn climate and advanced-materials innovation, grants act as early validation loops. Log9 Materials, the Indian deep-tech company building hydrogen and lithium-ion battery systems, used government and corporate R&D grants to prove feasibility long before mass production. Likewise, programs like Horizon Europe or NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission serve as credibility pipelines. In such ecosystems, a grant functions as institutional traction — trust validated by process. From Borrowed to EarnedThe founder’s craft is converting borrowed attention into earned adoption before the half-life expires. Borrowed traction lives on others’ balance sheets — investors, governments, partners.
Borrowed light gets you noticed. The Investor IllusionFrom the outside, a well-known investor appears to guarantee success. Teams shift from building to storytelling; energy goes into managing perception rather than measuring progress. That’s when capital turns from fuel to fog. Great founders treat fundraising as a moment to speed up iteration, not to relax. Attention Decay and Emotional DisciplineBehavioral psychology explains why founders fall for the illusion. The result: when attention inevitably fades, motivation dips. The disciplined ones do the opposite. Because markets don’t reward euphoria. Proof as StrategyIn the new funding climate, proof has become the most valuable signal of all. This shift actually empowers founders. That’s when capital becomes leverage, not a lifeline. Funding as MegaphoneFunding is a megaphone, not a melody. Used intentionally, it accelerates discovery. The best founders design the funding moment the way marketers design product launches:
Funding can compress trust cycles — but only if it’s integrated into a learning loop. Otherwise, it becomes expensive theatre. In the context of the borrowed light vs. the enduring fire, you don’t make a difference with the capital size, but with the proof velocity. The Playbook for Founders
The PrincipleCapital can buy you time, reach, and credibility — but not truth. Truth only comes from users. When used intentionally, borrowed credibility compresses trust cycles. The only sustainable use of borrowed trust is to earn your own faster. Closing ReflectionWe live in an era where capital itself carries content. But founders who endure treat that signal as rehearsal, not validation. Because in the long arc of markets, traction repays every loan of trust — or defaults on it.
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When Every Sale Feels Uphill: The Physics of Manufactured Demand
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