The cell highlighting was a shade of green that felt optimistic, which was the first sign of trouble. It was 3:04 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the Zoom window was dominated by a Google Sheet that had exactly 121 rows. I know because I counted them while the consultant, a man whose glasses were so perfectly circular they looked like they’d been drafted by an architect, explained the “comprehensive visibility roadmap.”

Row one was the header. The other 120 rows were a list of websites. Columns C, D, and E were labeled “DR,” “Price,” and “Category.”

“As you can see,” the consultant said, his cursor dancing over the 74 in the Domain Rating column for a site that looked like it hadn’t been updated since the Obama administration, “we’ve prioritized the high-authority domains. This gives us the best leverage for the initial push.”

The client, a technical cofounder named Elias who had been awake since five in the morning and was currently vibrating slightly from a lethal combination of caffeine and existential dread, squinted at the screen. He had paid four thousand dollars for this. He had expected a blueprint, a sequence of psychological triggers, a way to make his software feel inevitable. Instead, he had a directory list.

“So, which ones first?”

– Elias, cofounder

There was a pause. It lasted maybe two seconds, but in the vacuum of a video call, two seconds is a geological epoch. I saw the consultant’s eyes flick to the corner of the screen.

“I’d start at the top of the DR column,” the consultant said.

It was a sorting instruction presented as a strategy. It was a mathematical tautology masquerading as marketing wisdom. And Elias, bless his exhausted heart, nodded and said, “This is great. Really detailed.”

I lost an argument about this very thing last week. I told a friend that a list of places to put your name is not a plan for being known; it’s just a phone book with a higher bill. He told me I was being cynical, that “legible deliverables” are what keep the wheels of commerce turning.

I suppose he’s right, in the same way that a sand sculptor knows that a bucket of wet grit is technically a castle if you label the bucket “Chateau.” But as someone who spends their days trying to make heavy things stay upright against the wind, I have a hard time respecting a structure that collapses the moment you stop looking at it.

The McNamara Fallacy of Modern Growth

In the 1960s, during the height of the Vietnam War, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara became obsessed with what is now known as the McNamara Fallacy. It is the tendency to make decisions based solely on quantitative metrics-things you can count-and ignore everything else.

They counted body counts. They counted ammunition expended. They counted villages “pacified.” Because the numbers were going up, the charts said they were winning. The reality on the ground was a different, bloodier, and far more complex story that the spreadsheets couldn’t capture.

The growth marketing industry is currently in its McNamara phase. We count Domain Rating. We count “listing count.” We count rows in a spreadsheet. We produce these artifacts because they are defensible.

The transaction is stable precisely because neither party can actually evaluate the quality of the output. The consultant doesn’t want to admit that 94 of those sites are “ghost cities”-platforms with high SEO authority but zero actual human readers. The client doesn’t want to admit they don’t know how to turn a listing into a customer. So they both agree to worship the spreadsheet.

The core frustration here isn’t that the list is “bad.” It’s that the list is the product. You aren’t buying growth; you are buying the feeling of having a plan. It’s a decorative ruin, like the “follies” 18th-century English landowners used to build on their estates.

They would pay masons to build a half-collapsed stone tower or a fake Roman archway just to give the landscape a sense of history and gravitas. It served no purpose other than to look expensive and vaguely important from a distance. A list of 120 directories is a digital folly.

The Soul-Crushing Reality of the Grind

If you’ve ever actually tried to work through one of these lists, you know the soul-crushing reality of the “submission grind.” You open the first site. It’s a graveyard of AI-generated SaaS tools that all look like yours. You find the submission button.

It asks for a 50-word description, a 200-word description, three screenshots (all of which must be 1200×600 precisely), a logo, and a link. You spend forty minutes perfecting the entry. You hit submit.

Nothing happens. Not “nothing” in the sense of low conversion. “Nothing” in the sense that the page you just created has no way for a human being to actually find it. It exists in a silo, unlinked from the homepage, buried under four levels of pagination. But the consultant gets to mark that row as “Complete.”

What Elias needed wasn’t a list of 120 places to hide his product. He needed to understand the difference between a launch event and a launch asset.

Most platforms treat a launch like a firework. It’s bright, it’s loud, and then it’s a charred stick on the lawn. You spend weeks courting “hunters” and coordinating upvote circles, only to have your traffic drop to zero the moment the clock strikes midnight. This is why the spreadsheet with 120 rows looks so appealing-it promises 120 fireworks. But 120 charred sticks still leave you with a dark lawn.

The alternative is to look for platforms that don’t have an expiration date. There are corners of the internet where a submission isn’t a temporary bid for attention, but a permanent brick in your SEO wall.

For founders who are tired of the “upvote or die” cycle, finding a product hunt alternative that values longevity over a 24-hour spike is the difference between a strategy and a chore.

The Lesson of Compaction

I think about this when I’m working with sand. People think sand sculpting is about the final shape, but it’s actually about the compaction. If you don’t pack the sand tight enough, the moisture won’t hold, and the grains won’t lock.

You can spend ten hours carving the most beautiful window, but if the core isn’t solid, the whole thing will slide into the tide.

A growth strategy without a focus on permanence is a castle made of uncompacted sand. It looks great for the 3 p.m. Zoom call, but it won’t survive the first wave of reality.

The consultant in the circular glasses didn’t mention that. He didn’t mention that 30% of the sites on his list required a “maintenance fee” to stay live after the first month. He didn’t mention that the “do-follow” links he promised were actually “no-follow” on half the domains. He didn’t mention it because those details make the spreadsheet look less like a “roadmap” and more like a list of chores.

There is a certain dignity in a honest deliverable. I’d rather a consultant give me five places where my product will actually be seen by human eyes than 120 places where it will be indexed by a bot and forgotten by the world. But that is a hard sell. Five rows doesn’t look like four thousand dollars’ worth of work. 120 rows looks like a bargain.

We want the spreadsheet because it feels like progress. We want the 120 rows because it means we don’t have to think about the one thing that actually matters: Does anybody care?

Elias eventually finished the call. He closed the laptop and stared at the wall for a long time. He had his “strategy.” He had his 120 rows. He had his DR scores and his category tags. He had everything he paid for, and yet he felt more lost than he did at 2:59 p.m.

The tragedy of the “legible deliverable” is that it consumes the energy required to do the real work. By the time Elias finishes submitting to the first twenty sites on that list, he will be too exhausted to fix the onboarding flow that is actually killing his conversion rate. He will have traded his runway for a column of numbers, and he will call it “marketing.”

I wish I had won that argument last week. I wish I had been more persuasive, less cynical. I wish I could have explained that a map is only useful if it leads somewhere people actually live.

If you find yourself staring at a screen share of a Google Sheet this week, ask yourself one question: Is this a list of things to do, or is it a list of things that matter?

If the answer is “start at the top of the DR column,” close the laptop. Go for a walk. Build something out of sand. It will be more honest, and it will probably last just as long.