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Why funnels mislead — and loops drive real growth

Funnels end. Loops scale. Here’s how to make yours work—with your customer’s help.

Author

Peter Graham
July 25, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

For years, we’ve all been told to optimise the funnel.

Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Retention. Clean. Linear. Predictable.

But if you want to scale in 2025’s noisy, AI-driven landscape, funnels won’t get you there. Growth loops are the new model. And they work because they build momentum …

Why loops beat funnels

Brian Balfour (CEO Reforge, former VP Growth, HubSpot) and Andrew Chen (General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz) have written brilliantly about this. 

The core idea? Funnels have an end. Loops feed themselves. 

You create value for the customer, and that value drives acquisition, retention, or revenue - automatically.

As they put it in Reforge:

“Loops provide sustainable compounding growth. They force you to answer: How does one cohort of users lead to another cohort of users? You focus on how you reinvest the output of one cycle of the loop into the next cycle of the loop to get more output. This creates a compounding effect that is more sustainable.”

But here’s the part that often gets missed: 

Loops only work when they’re tied to what your customer actually cares about. 

That’s where voice-of-the-customer helps join the essential dots. 

Quick example: how customer insight reshapes the loop

Picture an online travel platform. Their loop is built around repeat group bookings. 

One person usually handles the booking, but others are involved in the trip.

So the growth team start asking:

  • Would other travellers want to co-manage the booking? 

  • Would group discounts or shared loyalty perks increase rebooking? 

  • Could referrals feel more like ‘trip planning with friends’, and less like pushing a product?

By aligning the loop with the real job (JTBD): “planning a smooth, cost-effective trip as a group” - the growth team stops guessing. They build what customers actually want.

Use voice-of-the-customer to tune your loop

If you’ve already found your key growth loop, the next step isn’t more A/B tests. It’s asking better questions.

Try this:

  • What is the customer trying to achieve at each step?
    → For group travellers, it might be a seamless way to organise and manage bookings together.

  • Where does the current experience fall short?
    → Maybe only one person can access the booking, making it harder for others to engage, review or rebook.

  • What would they tell us, if we asked?
    → Perhaps they'd love a loyalty perk they could share, or the ability to review their experience individually.

Growth loops work, but only when they help your customer make real progress.

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