The Innovation Death Spiral: How a Good Product Dies a Slow, Expensive Death

 Why disruptive launches spiral from concern to fear to panic — and the mindset shift that stops it 

I named the Innovation Death Spiral a couple of years ago, after watching the same pattern play out one too many times. What's striking is that whenever I describe it, everyone recognizes it — the R&D lead, the sales rep, the marketer, the founder. They've all lived a version of it. The details change; the shape never does.

Here's the shape.

The story

I once worked with a company that had a genuinely disruptive treatment for dry eye. Most of the market treats dry eye with hot compresses (the value of which is gone thirty seconds after you take the compress off), fish oil, or drops that only address part of the problem. These folks had a device that treated a completely different part of it. Real innovation, real science behind it.

Years of medtech development led up to a big launch. Big marketing program, big PR push, and — as so often happens — a high-powered, no-holds-barred VP of Sales brought in to drive the number.

Then the pattern. A couple of early wins, which built excitement. And then, a quarter or two in, reps started missing their goals. The company started missing revenue milestones. The energy in the building curdled into worry, and we did exactly what we've all been trained to do: we doubled down. You're not working hard enough. You're not making the calls I told you to make. You're not saying the things in the script. They changed the comp plan to pile on pressure. They rolled out new promotional campaigns, new pricing models, some direct-to-consumer. Each move bought a small bump — and then the company slid right back into the spiral.

That's the Innovation Death Spiral: a good product, built on solid research, that you take to market and watch circle the drain. It is a downward cycle of overspend and underdeliver — and then spending more to underdeliver more. Emotionally it runs from concern to fear to panic to crisis, and at every turn the adrenaline and cortisol rise.

Nobody in the spiral ever stops to ask the one question that matters: what if we're doing this wrong?

Instead you hear the excuses. The customers aren't ready. R&D didn't give us the right features. We're too early. And the one that truly kills me: we just have to educate the market. I learned long ago in the training world — if I have to teach someone that they should want the thing they're being taught, I'm in deep trouble. It doesn't work.

What actually causes it

Assume the product is good. Set that aside. With any launch there are a hundred moving parts, but two things drive a disruptive launch off the rails.

One: you have no repeatable sales process to hand your salesforce. By definition, a truly disruptive product does not have one at launch. It can't. The product is new to the company, new to your sales and marketing leadership, new to the sales team — and new to the customer, who has to learn an entirely unfamiliar way of solving their problem. Everything about how you sell it is a hypothesis. Yet the default move is to drop the disruptive product into the exact go-to-market machine you already run: the same inbound motions, the same outbound motions, the same mindset. For an incremental product that's fine — your assumptions are close enough. For a disruptive one, they're not.

Two: premature scaling. The most dangerous sentence in an early disruptive launch is "all we need is more salespeople." You do not scale sales and marketing until you have a repeatable sales process in place. Here's the math that makes it brutal. Hand an incremental product to a salesforce and they operate at maybe 60–70% of full effectiveness, because the market is known well enough. Hand them a disruptive product with no repeatable motion and they operate at 10, 20, maybe 30%. Scaling that up doesn't multiply revenue — it multiplies waste.

And the worst cost isn't money. It's time. Premature scaling does two destructive things at once: it shortens your cash runway by jacking up burn, and it lengthens your time to scale — because the moment you shift into "hire more reps" mode, you're in execution mindset, not discovery mindset, and you've stopped working on the one thing that actually unlocks growth. The repeatable sales process. So one of my reliable warning signs that a company is in the spiral is simple: they're scaling up sales and marketing to try to overcome the problem.

The hardest part: you are the problem

Here's the part nobody wants to hear. The problem isn't the reps. It isn't the market. It isn't the product. In this scenario, the problem is us — and it's a mindset problem. We're stuck in execution mode when we need to be in discovery mode.

I say this as someone who had to retrain himself. I was trained in sales. Five or six years ago I had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment about how differently I'd started working, and that's where this whole framework came from. So I'm not pointing a finger from the outside.

That diagnosis is good news and bad news. The bad news is that you have to admit you're the source of the problem. The good news is enormous: you can't control the market, you can't control timing, you only partly control your salesforce — but you have complete control over what happens in-house. Your actions, your sequencing, how you spend your time and your cash. All of that you can manage.

And the fix follows directly: get back into discovery mindset and run a gap analysis on the repeatable sales process. What's actually needed for it? What do we know? What do we still not know? Which of our assumptions are holding up — and which broken ones are we still clinging to?

Revenue is not the goal

This is the line that makes founders flinch: on a disruptive launch, revenue is not the goal. When I hear a founder using early revenue as the scoreboard for a disruptive product, I know they're trapped in execution mindset and not doing the discovery work that gets them to the inflection point in the revenue curve.

Early on, doubling or tripling revenue barely moves your company's valuation. What moves it is reaching scale in the shortest possible time — and the key to that is proving you can generate revenue repeatably. Not how much you made, but that you can do it again and again. Once you have that repeatable process, the economics flip: you put one dollar of resource in and get ten out. Before you have it, every dollar you pour in disappears.

This is also why bringing in a growth-stage VP of Sales during the introduction stage is so dangerous. They arrive with a toolkit built for executing a known process — and there is no known process yet. They throw gasoline on the fire. We compound the problem by putting people on a pedestal who simply got lucky doing it the old way, which keeps the whole cycle alive.

Discovery selling — and why it's still selling

One critical clarification: discovery is not market research. Jobs-to-be-done, customer discovery, lean, agile — all of that is market research, and it's valuable. But the sales process is where you actually get someone to buy, and that's a different thing. Discovery selling means you're genuinely selling while you learn — and the data is real because money (or a real trade of value) is on the table.

A small example of what that looks like. Most companies pay physicians an honorarium — $500, $1,000 — to sit for a discovery interview. I never offer money up front, and I still get the interviews. Why does that matter? Because a physician who gives me an hour of unpaid time is making a real trade — their time is money — and that decision is itself a signal of genuine interest in solving the problem. The sales process starts right there, in the very first conversation.

You can't scale a discovery process — that's the point of it. Discovery is how you get to a repeatable process, which is the thing you then scale. You speed discovery up two ways: adopt a scientific-method mindset (design two or three quick experiments to reach customers with different messages, get signal, validate over time), and push the work earlier — start discovery selling while the product is still being developed, so that by launch you already hold real pieces of the puzzle.

The Takeaway

The Innovation Death Spiral isn't caused by a bad product or a bad market. It's caused by taking a disruptive product and running it through a sales process built for a known one — then, when the numbers slip, scaling that broken process instead of questioning it. Concern becomes fear becomes panic becomes crisis, and the spending accelerates the whole way down.

The escape isn't more reps, more pressure, or more campaigns. It's a mindset shift: stop executing a process you haven't discovered yet, and go discover it. Admit the problem is in-house, where you actually have control. Treat the non-sale as a learning step, not a failure. And measure the right thing — not this quarter's revenue, but whether you can earn it repeatably.

You can't control the market, the timing, or your luck. You can control whether you're still pretending you have a sales process you've never actually found.

This article is part of the Sell Now Lab — frameworks and field notes on selling before you launch. Learn more at viaverus.com.