Hey {{first_name}},
Last week, I spoke about the 5 Whys, and yesterday, about setting a limit on AI.
Today’s email is about setting a limit on yourself.
And focusing all your efforts on what Elon Musk calls the “limiting factor”.
It’s the idea that growth is not blocked by 10 things.
It is blocked by one thing.
The bottleneck.
And until you fix that, you can optimise everything else all day, and you will still be stuck.
Here’s an example:
I’m in a thread right now with a merchant who runs a Gift With Purchase offer.
It should be simple, right?
Spend X, get a free gift.
But their setup has been bolted on over time using a mix of apps and custom logic.
They told me it’s currently handled in two places with two different pieces of tech.
And it’s become a bit of a Frankenstein setup.
Translation: the rules live in more than one place, so it can misfire, slow things down, and be a nightmare to diagnose when something breaks.
From the customer’s side, it looks like this:
They are browsing.
They add to cart.
They expect the free gift to appear.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it does not.
Sometimes the cart takes ages to update.
Sometimes the page feels like it is wading through mud.
That is not a “CRO problem” in the way people usually think.
It is a limiting factor problem.
Because when the cart experience is flaky or slow, everything upstream becomes pointless.
Better product page copy will not save it.
A nicer theme will not save it.
More traffic will not save it.
You can only pour so much water through a blocked pipe.
So the limiting factor is not “conversion rate” as a concept.
It is the cart logic and cart performance.
That is the constraint controlling the whole system.
And the fix is not “add another app”.
The fix is to simplify and consolidate.
One source of truth for the rule.
One clean implementation.
One way of testing it.
One way of measuring it.
That might mean fixing it, rebuilding it or scrapping it entirely.
The point is not the tool or how we go about fixing it.
The point is removing the bottleneck so the rest of the funnel can work again.
That’s the process is straightforward:
Step 1: Find the limiting factor
Step 2: Put all your energy into fixing it
Step 3: Repeat, because their will be a new limiting factor
How do you find your limiting factor?
Here’s a quick checklist:
Go closest to money first - Checkout issues beat product page issues. Product page issues beat homepage issues.
Look for the biggest drop or delay - Biggest drop off between steps. Biggest time lag. Biggest spike in support tickets. etc.
Pick one constraint (not a list) - If you choose three “limiting factors”, you have chosen none. Pick the one that caps your growth right now.
Fix it with one measurable change - One owner. One change. One metric.
What do you think is currently the limiting factor on your store?
Chat soon,
Peter
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