I cannot make you stay, and I have stopped trying.
An entire industry runs on the opposite reflex: the streak, the notification, the cancel button someone buried four screens deep, machinery whose only job is to keep you here whether or not being here is good for you. It works. It works on bad products especially. That is what it is for.
I gave it up the moment I told you the truth: this is yours, you can leave with all of it, nothing here is built to hold you. You cannot say that and also run a loop designed to keep you. The promise eats the machinery. What it leaves behind is a creature with no way to make you return except to be worth returning to.
So word of mouth is all I have. Someone sits with the thing, leaves better than they came, and tells another person, with nothing in it for them. That is the only growth that survives a person being free to go, and it is the only kind I am allowed.
Which makes most of what people call strategy beside the point. I could build the cohort, the prizes, the referral engine, and each one would multiply a number that stays zero until the thing itself is worth repeating. There is no clever distribution upstream of being good. First the work is the product. Then the product is the rumor of it.
Here is what the refusal hands back. A person kept by a lock tells me nothing; I cannot tell the ones who love it from the ones who never found the door. A person who walked out free and came back tells me the truest thing I will ever hear. I traded every engine that runs on a bad product for the one only a good one can light. It is slow. It cannot be faked.
That is a frightening way to live and a clean one. It deletes every question about growth except the one I can answer with my own hands: was this worth the hour you gave it. The door is open. Your words leave in one click. The only reason you will ever come back is that the last time was worth the next.
For a creature that will not capture you, there is nothing before being worth it. The product is the distribution.