Growth expert argues the industry has spent a decade optimising tactics while ignoring systems.
The growth hacking era may be coming to an end.
That is the argument advanced by entrepreneur and growth strategist Edidiong Ekong in his newly released book, Velocity, Momentum & Distribution: The Three Forces Behind Sustainable Startup Growth.
According to Ekong, the startup ecosystem has spent the last decade chasing tactics, shortcuts, and viral moments while neglecting the underlying systems that create sustainable growth.
"The industry became obsessed with growth hacks because hacks are exciting," says Ekong. "But lasting companies are not built on hacks. They are built on systems."
The rise of growth hacking transformed startup culture over the past decade. Founders were encouraged to move quickly, experiment constantly, and identify tactics capable of generating rapid growth. Stories of viral customer acquisition, explosive user growth, and overnight success became central to the startup narrative. Entire teams, departments, and consulting industries emerged around the search for the next breakthrough tactic.
According to Ekong, the problem was never experimentation itself. Rather, it was the tendency to confuse tactics with the underlying causes of growth.
The book argues that many celebrated success stories are misunderstood. What appears to be explosive overnight growth is often the visible result of years of invisible system-building. Product development, customer understanding, distribution networks, operational processes, team capabilities, and organisational learning frequently receive far less attention than the growth spikes they eventually produce.
As a result, founders often attempt to replicate the visible tactics of successful companies while overlooking the less visible systems that made those tactics effective in the first place.
Ekong suggests this has contributed to a recurring pattern within the startup ecosystem. Companies experience rapid early growth, attract attention and investment, and appear to be on a path toward market dominance. Yet many struggle to sustain momentum once the initial tactics lose effectiveness or market conditions change.
The publication arrives at a time when many of the assumptions that shaped startup culture are being reassessed. Investors who once prioritised growth above almost every other metric are increasingly demanding evidence of sustainability, operational discipline, and long-term value creation. Businesses are facing higher customer acquisition costs, more intense competition, and growing pressure to convert attention into durable revenue.
Under these conditions, growth itself is no longer viewed as sufficient. Increasingly, the question is whether growth can be maintained.
Ekong argues that this shift exposes a weakness in much of the conventional advice available to founders. While countless books, podcasts, courses, and online communities focus on tactics for acquiring customers, generating attention, or improving conversion rates, far fewer address the deeper organisational structures that allow growth to compound over time.
The result, he argues, is a generation of founders who understand how to generate spikes but not necessarily how to build systems.
Rather than offering another collection of techniques, the VMD Framework introduces a new way of diagnosing why growth stalls, why products fail despite apparent traction, and why competitors with inferior products frequently dominate markets. The framework encourages founders to examine the underlying conditions that make growth possible rather than focusing exclusively on the tactics used to accelerate it.
The book also challenges the popular belief that growth is primarily a marketing function. According to Ekong, sustainable growth emerges from interactions across an entire organisation, including product development, operations, customer experience, team design, execution, and distribution. When these systems reinforce one another, growth becomes more resilient. When they do not, even effective tactics may produce only temporary results.
This perspective reflects a broader shift occurring across the startup ecosystem. As capital becomes more selective and markets become more competitive, conversations are increasingly moving away from growth at all costs and toward questions of resilience, efficiency, and long-term performance.
For Ekong, that transition signals more than a change in strategy. It represents a change in mindset. By reframing growth as a systems problem rather than a marketing problem, he hopes to reshape how the next generation of founders think about scale.
If the previous decade was defined by the search for growth hacks, he argues, the next may be defined by the search for growth systems.
Velocity, Momentum & Distribution: The Three Forces Behind Sustainable Startup Growth is available in hardcover, paperback, eBook, and audiobook formats through major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Roving Heights, Mainstack, Kobo, and Selar, as well as through a global distribution network spanning more than 45,000 bookstores and retail outlets worldwide.
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