The loophole mindset

Kaŝpasejo is Esperanto for loophole. I didn’t pick the name to be clever. I picked it because, after twenty years of this, I’ve come to believe most growth problems have a hidden door, and most teams are too busy pushing on the wall to look for it.

More is the lazy answer

The default response to a stuck number is more: more spend, more features, more headcount. Sometimes that’s right. Usually it’s a way of avoiding the harder question, which is where exactly is the constraint, and is there a way around it that doesn’t cost a year?

A loophole isn’t a hack. It’s the legitimate move that the people closest to the problem stopped being able to see, because they normalised the wall.

How to find the door

The opening is almost always at a seam: between two teams, two products, two assumptions nobody revisits.

Three habits help:

• Question the unit of work. Teams optimise the thing they’re measured on. The opportunity is often in the thing nobody owns.
• Follow the energy, not the org chart. Where are users already trying to do something the product makes hard? That’s a door.
• Subtract before you add. The sharpest strategy is usually a removal: a narrower buyer, a smaller promise, a clearer no.

The catch

Loopholes have a shelf life. Once found, they close, because they get copied or because the world moves. That’s fine. The skill isn’t finding one door. It’s building the habit of always looking for the next one.