And why even Uber had to break its own category to grow.
You can ship more features, send more emails, run more experiments, and still feel stuck. The numbers don’t move. Your active users level off. Last month looks the same as this month. You work harder, but progress stays flat.
Most teams call this a retention problem. But the real issue sits underneath retention:
Your core behavior doesn’t happen often enough.
This is the limit Uber ran into. And it’s the same limit many SaaS companies hit without realizing it.
The Hidden Limit Inside Uber
Uber had a massive brand, strong demand, and a product people loved. But they still hit a ceiling in growth.
The reason is simple: People only take a limited number of rides.
Ride-hailing is episodic. You take a ride when you travel or when you go out.
Most weeks, you don’t need a ride at all.
No amount of reminders, discounts, or new features can change the nature of that behavior. You can’t increase ride frequency beyond the limits of daily life.
This is the “category ceiling.” The point where the nature of the behavior, limits growth. Every product category has one.
Categories Follow the Frequency of the Need
How often users need something determines the limits of the category.
Some needs are more infrequent:
Filing taxes (once a year)
Renewing a passport (every few years)
Moving homes (rarely)
Hiring contractors (only when something breaks)
No product can make these behaviors repeat more often.
Other needs to repeat often:
Messaging friends
Checking finances
Managing tasks
Eating meals
When a product has needs that repeat often, products retain better.
When Growth Feels Like Running in Place
Retention curves flatten early when a product depends on infrequent behavior. New users arrive, but they don’t return often enough to create momentum. Not because the experience is bad, but because their need isn’t frequent.
This creates a treadmill effect. Users slip away faster than you can replace them, so your active base grows a small percentage. Revenue grows in small, forgettable increments. Teams push harder, yet the entire curve remains unchanged.
It looks like a retention issue. But it’s the predictable outcome of a behavior that isn’t part of users’ weekly rhythm.
Where Teams Go Wrong
When growth slows, most teams default to the same playbook. They ship more features, send more notifications, and offer more incentives. These tactics produce brief lift, but the ceiling stays in place.
Pressure builds. The roadmap accelerates. Marketing tries to compensate. But none of it changes the underlying constraint.
You know you’ve hit a ceiling when growth feels heavy and expensive. Your best users don’t return often, and new acquisition doesn’t increase daily or weekly actives.
This isn’t an execution problem. It’s structural.
How Uber Broke the Ceiling
Uber didn’t push riders to take more rides. They built a new behavior with higher frequency.
Uber Eats.
People order food far more often than they take rides. Meals happen several times a day. Routines and habits are the foundation of food delivery.
Uber Eats gave users a second reason to open the app. One that fits a daily rhythm instead of an occasional need. That changed everything: engagement, retention, revenue, and the pace of compounding.
Eats didn’t only add a new line of business. It unlocked growth that the ride-hailing category couldn’t support on its own.
This is the shift most companies need but rarely consider.
Finding Your Version of Uber Eats
Every business has a higher-frequency behavior nearby. The job is to identify it.
Start by acknowledging the true rhythm of your current category. If the natural behavior isn’t daily or weekly, forcing more usage won’t work. Once you see the limit, you can look for a behavior your users do more often.
Often, the unlock sits right outside the current product. It may feel bold or unfamiliar. That’s usually a sign you’re on the right track.
Companies that grow find ways to break the category ceiling when optimization fails.
Build or Buy: Two Paths Through the Ceiling
There are two ways to introduce a higher-frequency behavior: build it or buy it.
Building a new behavior takes time and resources: research, design, testing, and iteration. It can be expensive and slow.
Acquisition is often faster. You look for a product, workflow, tool, or engine someone else already created. You buy it, inherit its users, and bring that consistent rhythm into your ecosystem.
This is one of the core principles Design Labs Consulting follows:
Don’t chase small lifts inside a ceiling. If you want real compounding, fix the root cause.
Break the ceiling, and the product finally has room to grow.
Getting Back to Compounding
Growth becomes easier when the behavior aligns with users’ daily lives. To unlock compounding, you have to move beyond the ceiling. A new product, an acquisition, or a deliberate shift in strategy is what removes the pressure. Stop sprinting after marginal improvements that never change the trajectory. Solve the behavior problem, and meaningful gains follow.
Marketing gets cheaper. Retention rises on its own. Revenue begins to stack month after month. Progress becomes visible again.
This is what compounding looks like. Fix the behavior, and everything else starts to work the way it should.
