A growth chart is a thing you draw after the work. We are still doing the work. The day we have a chart worth showing, we will still not put it on the homepage. We will put it in the rings, where the operators can see it next to the rest of the season’s honest record.
This is a position, not a temporary state. The reason has to do with what a homepage growth chart actually does and who it is for.
The chart is for the wrong reader.
A growth chart on a marketing-tools homepage is a screenshot. It is the screenshot a sales operator drops into a deck, the screenshot the founder reposts on a feed, the screenshot the lead-gen vendor laminates onto a postcard. It is not, in the great majority of cases, an analytical instrument. It is a piece of social proof.
The reader we are writing for has seen the screenshot. They have seen its cousin and its cousin’s cousin. They know how it’s built; they have, more often than they would like, helped build one for a tool that didn’t deserve it. The screenshot is not a signal of trustworthiness for them. It is, at this point, mild evidence to the contrary.
So the question becomes: what would actually persuade the reader we are writing for? And the answer turns out to be the opposite of the chart.
What persuades the reader we are writing for.
The reader we’re writing for is persuaded by specifics. By the named transport that didn’t work and the named gate that caught it. By the dated changelog entry that says “we shipped a thing that’s a little embarrassing and here is what it does.” By the founder’s actual email address at the bottom of the about page. By the small, weathered details that you can’t fake from a marketing brief.
None of those are charts. All of them are paragraphs.
The chart will get drawn. Just not yet, and not here.
One day a season’s rings will tell the story of a small business that grew, with us in the loop, in a way that compounded. The chart of that growth will be in that operator’s rings, where it belongs. If the operator wants to share it, they will. If they don’t, they won’t. We will not take it off the rings and put it on our homepage.
Not because it would be bad social proof — it would be excellent social proof — but because the moment we do that, we have started optimizing for the homepage instead of the operator. And once you start optimizing the homepage, the homepage is what gets the work.
The line we’d draw if we did draw a line.
If we ever drew a line on the homepage, it would not be a chart of customers acquired or revenue made. It would be a small, slightly off-true horizontal rule labeled “the years.” It would have no axis on the right. It would be the same line a tradesperson draws when they explain how they have been quietly busy for thirty years.
That line is not a chart. It is a sentence in line form. Sentences are what we put on this site.
— Bristlecone Journal № 01. Written in Methuselah Grove, 2026.