Let me tell you about InVideo, because it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of what happens when you stop solving the wrong problem.
Back in 2022, InVideo’s growth had plateaued. They saw 16 months where growth was stuck at 20%. Plenty of sign-ups every day, but the numbers weren’t moving the way Sanket Shah, their CEO, knew they could.
He came to us convinced he had a positioning problem. “We were building and building,” he told me, “but it got to the point where we didn’t know what we stood for.”
Here’s the thing, it turns out they didn’t have a positioning problem. They had a systems problem. And almost everybody who’s stuck has the same one.
Is growth stalling? Perhaps you’re reading your business backwards
Let me explain what I mean by a system, because the word gets thrown around a lot.
Most people use it to mean something static – inputs go in, an output comes out, you tune the machine. That’s how engineers tend to think about it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But here at Re-Wired, we look at it the other way around. A system, to us, is a chain of cause and effect that you read from the right, not the left. You start with the outcome you want. Then the output you’d have to produce to get there. Then the functions that produce that output. Then, last, the inputs.
Most companies do it backwards. They start on the left, they’ll say here’s what we’ve got, here are our features, let’s push them out and see what happens.
The trade-offs belong to you, and not the customer
That’s exactly the trap InVideo found themselves in. They had a pile of users asking for different things, so they kept adding inputs.
More inputs means more features and more complexity. They were tuning the machine without ever asking what the machine was supposed to make. Trust me, more features won’t fix a plateau in growth.
When you start on the left, you make all your trade-offs the consumer’s problem. When you start on the right, you make the trade-offs as the producer. That, we’ve come to believe, is the whole game. Fewer trade-offs for the customer, more for you. That’s what makes a better product.
So we started on the right.
After reviewing the outcome InVideo’s customers were looking for by applying systems thinking, over ten weeks we did the Jobs to be Done work.
This involved interviewing customers to find the progress they were trying to make — not what they asked for or what the InVideo team thought they wanted. What were they hiring InVideo to do? The analysis pulled out three core Jobs, and one of them nobody saw coming.
The advanced users. These were the users who were demanding all the sophisticated features. InVideo had been building for them for months, but this group was still leaving. When we dug in, the cause and effect underneath was the opposite of what everyone assumed. “The aha moment,” Sanket said, “was unlocking that these users were actually coming to us for simplicity.”
Read that again, because it’s a systems insight, not just a research finding.
The output they thought they had to produce – more power, more depth – was actually pushing the outcome further away. Every feature they shipped to satisfy that third Job was scaring off the people they served best. The functions in the middle were working against the outcome.
So we made a recommendation that felt, on the surface, insane: drop a Job.
Take the two Jobs where the demand really was, and go all-in. De-prioritize the third.
This is where most people freeze, because it looks like leaving money on the table.
The math said dropping Job 3 might cost them 15 to 20% of the business. But that’s left-to-right thinking — protecting your inputs. When you read the system from the right, you can see the trade-off clearly. Building deeper and deeper was the thing causing the stall. “Sometimes in life,” Sanket said, “your back is against the wall, your constraints are really clear, and it makes it easier to make a decision.”
They dropped it. And here’s what happened: a portion of those Job 3 users were perfectly happy to move over to the simpler product, and a portion left. “By doing so we only strengthened things,” Sanket told me. “We didn’t lose anything. In fact, we grew.”
Grew is underselling it.
They relaunched in August 2022 around a single outcome — anyone, whatever they’re making, should be able to create a better video than they could before, in two minutes instead of an hour. That became the North Star. Every function in the business got pointed at it. Product builds for it. Marketing buckets users into the two Jobs and works off one source of truth — the document of findings — to make everything from landing pages to ads.
That’s what applying systems thinking looks like in practice: a system that’s now dynamic. It reinforces itself. Six months after relaunch they’d gone from zero to $25 million in new revenue. Today they’re in over 190 countries with 20 million people creating on the platform, one of the most-used AI products in the world.
InVideo doesn’t sell video creation, they sell simplicity. And they only got there by refusing to keep adding inputs and instead asking, from the right-hand side: what’s the outcome, and what would we actually have to be to produce it?
That’s the part I want you to take away.
The plateau was never about positioning, and it’s rarely about features.
When growth stalls, it’s almost always because the system is being read in the wrong direction — you’re tuning inputs to chase an outcome you’ve never clearly named. Name the outcome first. Find the progress your best customers are hiring you to make. Then build backwards to it, and have the nerve to cut whatever’s working against it.
If your growth has flattened and your team can’t agree on what you stand for, that’s the work we do. Jobs to be Done to find where the real demand is, and applying systems thinking to redesign the product around it.
Come talk to us, we’ll help you read your own business from the right.