Revenue Flywheel
A model that treats revenue as compounding rather than linear: satisfied customers generate expansion, referral and reputation that reduce the cost of the next acquisition.
What it corrects in the funnel
A funnel ends at the sale, which encodes the assumption that the customer relationship is an outcome rather than an input. In a subscription business the majority of lifetime value usually arrives after the first purchase, so a model that stops at closed-won ignores most of the economics.
Operationally
The flywheel is only real if post-sale motion is instrumented as seriously as pre-sale. If onboarding, adoption and expansion have no owner and no measurement, the model is a diagram rather than a system.
The test
RELATED TERMS
Revenue Funnel
The staged model describing how prospects progress from first awareness to closed revenue, used to locate where volume is lost between stages.
Bowtie Model
An extension of the funnel that mirrors it after the sale — the narrow point is the purchase, with onboarding, adoption, retention and expansion forming the second half.
Expansion Revenue
Additional recurring revenue from existing customers: more seats, higher tiers, additional products or increased usage.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Revenue retained from an existing cohort over a period including expansion, expressed as a percentage of where that cohort started. The clearest single indicator of whether the base grows without new customers.
Learn how to apply this: RevOps 101: Revenue Operations Foundations
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