Better is losing

Good morning, Riveters.

Most companies don’t lose because they’re worse; they lose because they’re harder to work with, harder to buy from, and harder to use. This week’s Rivet Report breaks down why the fastest-growing businesses are winning by removing friction, not piling on features, and how that mindset quietly compounds growth.

Plus, you’ll discover what’s shifting right now across the economy, along with a practical growth move you can apply this week without adding more to your roadmap.

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Economy

A new report shows US GDP growth slowing over the next decade, driven by demographics, weak labor market support, and fiscal pressures. Improvements in productivity from artificial intelligence and emerging tech could help soften the slowdown, even as broader economic drivers fade.
What this means to you: The economy’s performance has a wider base than just consumer spending, and that innovation might buffer macroheadwinds in 2026.
Source: Axios

AI
The federal government signed an executive order to limit state-level regulation of artificial intelligence, aiming to create a uniform national policy. This move could reduce compliance complexity for startups but raises concerns about the balance between innovation and safe, responsible deployment. State leaders and civil rights groups argue that local approaches often emerge from real community concerns and that a one-size-fits-all federal standard may miss nuanced risks.
Source: Politico
What this means for you:
This signals a potential shift toward easier scaling, but also a need to think about ethical risk, trust, and future rulemaking at the federal level.

Startups
Investors backed nearly 700 seed-stage deals of $10 million or more this year, a new high. This reflects strong conviction in early-stage innovation, especially where founders demonstrate clear domain expertise and differentiated technology. At the same time, talent competition continues to surge, with some reporting overwhelming applicant volume and resource strain in hiring processes.
Source: Crunchbase News
What this means for you:
Capital is available if your startup tells a compelling story with evidence of traction or product-market fit. Talent remains a bottleneck, not just access to capital. Invest in hiring infrastructure and smart automation to gain an edge.

“Better” is overrated.

Not because quality doesn’t matter. It does. Because most markets don’t reward marginally better products.

They reward products that remove friction.

This is known. We like to believe growth comes from superior features, smarter tech, or more innovation. And in some cases it does. What is harder to accept is people choose the option that asks the least of them.

That’s not laziness. It’s reality.

Every extra step, decision is a tax. And taxes slow growth.

When growth stalls, teams usually react the same way. Ship faster. Add features. Increase spend.

But stalled growth is rarely a feature problem. It’s an effort problem.

Customers don’t abandon products because they fail spectacularly. They leave because using them feels like work. Setup takes too long. Onboarding feels fragile. Success depends on remembering five things at once. Internal champions get tired of explaining how it works.

So they quietly switch.

What’s interesting is how often “better” loses to “good enough but easy.” Not because the easy product is smarter, but because it respects the user’s time.

Ease compounds. Less effort leads to faster activation. Faster activation leads to habit. Habit leads to retention. Retention lowers CAC. Lower CAC funds growth.

That loop is hard to beat.

Many teams treat ease as a UX cleanup step at the end. That’s backward.

Ease is built into decisions like:

Amazon didn’t win because checkout looked nicer. They won because they removed thinking.

Zoom didn’t win on features. It won by reducing failure.

Slack didn’t spread because it was powerful. It spread because it was easy to start alone.

None of these were accidents.

Where are users doing work that shouldn’t exist?

Look for moments where motivated people slow down:

That’s your growth leak.

Run a friction audit on one core flow. Sit down and complete it yourself. No shortcuts. No internal knowledge.

Then ask three blunt questions:

Fixing one of those often beats building three new features.

The next wave of winning companies won’t brag about being smarter. They’ll feel calm to use. And in a world where attention is thin and patience thinner, calm is rare.

It’s the strategy most teams overlook.

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Cut one step, not ten features.

This week’s play is simple and uncomfortable: pick one high-intent flow in your business and remove a single step. Not optimize it. Remove it. Founders love adding features because it feels like progress, but growth usually comes from subtraction. Look at your signup, checkout, demo request, onboarding, or first-use flow and ask where momentum slows for no good reason. A form field that could be optional. A decision that could be deferred. A manual step that could be automated. One less step often outperforms months of product work because it compounds across every user who touches it. Subtraction is harder to justify internally, but it’s one of the fastest ways to unlock real growth.