90% of your growth problem is product, not marketing.

A familiar cycle

It begins with a target.

A revenue figure, growth curve, or user number often ambitious, sometimes unrealistic. Leadership aligns around it, and marketing is tasked with making it happen. Budgets are increased. Agencies are briefed. Campaigns are launched.

And then the numbers don’t move.

Within a quarter or two, marketing is questioned. Then replaced. A new head of growth or CMO steps in. A new strategy is pitched. But the outcome rarely changes.

Eventually, attention shifts elsewhere to retention data, activation metrics, and user churn. The diagnosis finally surfaces.

It wasn’t a marketing failure. It was a product issue all along.

The Rand Fishkin lens

Earlier this week, SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin posted what he called an “unpopular opinion.” It wasn’t new, but it was accurate.

“In 90%+ of cases where leadership demands marketing hit a certain growth target, then fires the team for not hitting it, the problem has nothing to do with marketing.”

The comment struck a chord across LinkedIn. But more importantly, it exposed an unspoken truth in startup and scale-up circles: marketing is often handed ownership of growth, even when the product isn’t ready to scale.

Marketing is not your miracle worker

In theory, marketing is a growth lever. It brings visibility, drives acquisition, builds awareness, and converts interest into action.

But marketing doesn’t fix churn.
It doesn’t repair broken onboarding flows.
It can’t manufacture product-market fit.

And yet, many CEOs treat it like a standalone engine. They raise expectations, often influenced by board pressure or investor timelines, and place the burden entirely on performance campaigns and brand strategy.

What follows is predictable: when results lag, the marketing team is replaced. But the fundamentals don’t shift because the real issue wasn’t distribution. It was retention. Usability. Value perception.

When AI makes marketing easy, product becomes the bottleneck

Today’s marketing stack is more powerful than ever.

AI tools can generate hundreds of creatives, automate email flows, spin up SEO content, personalize at scale, and test dozens of audience segments within hours. The barrier to execution has dropped dramatically.

But none of that matters if users don’t return.

In 2025, the constraint is no longer reach. It’s relevance.
It’s not awareness. It’s adoption.
And that’s where product becomes central.

A weak product amplified by excellent marketing fails faster.
A strong product with no marketing may still grow slowly but organically.
But only when both work together does exponential scale begin.

When AI becomes the new crypto

There’s a deeper subtext to the marketing blame game one that applies not just to SaaS, but to entire tech cycles.

Freelance writer Eric Novinson pointed it out succinctly:

Lots of AI companies are probably in this situation right now, and before that it was cryptocurrency. They’re selling products that potential customers don’t need or want, so they’re really selling stock to investors.

Rand Fishkin responded with a knowing smirk:

Hype-based product building is dangerous. Plus side you can do whatever you want with that investor money in the meantime.

This is not just snark. It’s structural.

Much of the current AI boom mirrors the 2021 crypto wave. The metrics that matter retention, revenue, utility are often absent or weak. But what’s loud is the fundraising. The exits. The demos.

In these scenarios, marketing becomes more than a scapegoat. It becomes a distraction a way to keep the illusion of traction alive while the core product remains underbaked or irrelevant.

The quiet conversation every leadership team needs

What if CMOs started saying no earlier?

What if growth heads stopped accepting targets that ignore user behavior?
What if CEOs and founders sat with their product analytics before setting revenue goals?

More importantly what if startups stopped treating marketing as the problem solver of last resort?

Rand’s post, and the many experiences it echoes, suggest a new form of accountability. Not just for marketers, but for leadership.

Because at some point, the question isn’t “why didn’t marketing deliver?”

It’s “why did we expect it to?”

The bottom line

Growth doesn’t die because of poor performance ads.
It dies when the product doesn’t deliver value.
It dies when leadership ignores retention signals.
It dies when real user friction is buried under dashboards and decks.

Marketing was never the problem. It just became the most visible one.

And that’s the delusion most teams are still stuck in.