FastWill builds software for a market where 76% of Americans need the product and almost nobody buys it. The way they solved that friction is the same move most B2B companies miss when revenue stops growing: they stopped treating a constraint problem like a volume problem.
Only 24% of American adults have a will. That's down from 33% in 2022, according to Caring.com's 2025 Wills and Estate Planning Survey, which polled more than 2,500 adults. Three quarters of the country has no legal plan for what happens to their home, their savings, or their children. The most common reason given by people without one: 43% said they just hadn't gotten around to it.
That's the market FastWill is building into. Vinson Wong, President at the company, joined Reade Milner on the Grow Rogue Podcast to talk about how they're approaching a category where nearly everyone needs the product and almost nobody buys it. The pattern they've had to solve for is the same pattern stalling B2B pipelines every day: the instinct to fix a friction problem by adding more volume.
The FastWill thesis is that wills and trusts are a friction problem, not a demand problem.
The Caring.com data backs this up directly. Procrastination is the top reason Americans give for not having a will, ahead of cost, ahead of complexity, ahead of "not enough assets." The buyer knows what probate does when there's no estate plan. They've heard the story from a friend whose parent died without one. They still haven't done it.
That gap shows up in B2B pipelines the same way. A prospect agrees with everything on the call, says yes to the next step, then goes quiet for three weeks. The instinct is to blame follow-up or pricing. The actual cause is usually more specific: something earlier in the process created friction, and nobody identified it or removed it.
In FastWill's category, the friction is the process itself. Attorney-drawn estate plans run several thousand dollars and feel intimidating before they begin. As Vinson described it, advisors keep watching clients skip estate planning because the attorney quote comes back too high:
"Six, seven thousand dollars for a flat package. Advisors keep watching their clients just not do it."
Vinson Wong, President, FastWillIn B2B, the friction is usually something narrower. A specific objection that keeps recurring. A trust gap that marketing never closed before the rep got on the call. A handoff between teams where information stops flowing. Until that friction gets named and addressed, more follow-up doesn't close the gap.
When revenue flattens, the first leadership conversation almost always centers on volume. More top-of-funnel activity. Another rep. Higher ad spend. The assumption built into all of those responses is that something isn't getting fed into the machine fast enough.
In our experience, that assumption is wrong more often than it's right.
FastWill is a useful case study because they didn't try to outspend the friction. The instinct in a category where every family is a potential buyer would be to pour money into direct-to-consumer marketing. They did some of that. The bigger move was building a B2B channel. FastWill's professional platform works with financial advisors, insurance agents, and group benefits providers, putting estate planning into conversations these professionals are already having with their clients. As Vinson put it:
"Advisors are doing financial planning for you holistically. That includes estate planning. It becomes a nice differentiator for them in the competitive landscape."
Vinson Wong, President, FastWillThe channel design wasn't a marketing tactic. It was a constraint fix. The buyer's decision moment was almost never on a Facebook ad. It was in a conversation with someone they already trusted.
This is what makes revenue diagnosis hard, and it's why the Theory of Constraints has been a foundational business framework for forty years. Eliyahu Goldratt introduced it in his 1984 book The Goal, which Time magazine later listed among the 25 most influential business management books ever written. The core idea is straightforward: every process has a single dominant constraint, and total output can only improve when the constraint improves. Optimizing anything else is wasted work.
Applied to revenue, this is the move most leadership teams miss. The instinct when pipeline conversion is low is to look at lead quality. When close rates are down, it's to look at the sales team. When revenue is flat, it's to look at marketing. Those are reasonable starting points. They're also almost always the wrong ones.
The constraint typically lives one stage upstream from where the symptom appears. For FastWill, the symptom was that direct-to-consumer conversion was slower than the size of the addressable market suggested. The actual constraint was that the buyer's decision almost never happened in a vacuum. It happened inside a trusted relationship that was already in motion.
For a B2B company in a revenue stall, the constraint is usually something equally specific: a positioning gap pulling the wrong buyers into the pipeline, a trust deficit the sales rep now has to fix from scratch on every call, or a handoff between marketing and sales where information stops flowing.
If revenue is flattening and the usual fixes aren't moving the number, the Marketing & Revenue Assessment shows why you aren't hitting your numbers.
Book a strategy conversationFinding the real constraint is a diagnostic process, not a brainstorming one. In our work with sales-led B2B teams, it starts with the sales conversation. Not the CRM. Not the marketing dashboard. Not the pipeline report.
The sales conversation is where the constraint reveals itself. What objections repeat across deals? Where do qualified opportunities go quiet? What does a sales rep keep re-explaining that marketing should have already answered? What belief is the buyer bringing into the conversation that has to be corrected before anything else can happen?
FastWill's diagnostic process produced a result Vinson didn't expect. He came into the business assuming the core buyer would be parents in their 30s and 40s with young children and new mortgages. The data said something different:
"Our core demographic is actually 65-year-old women and over. Younger buyers in their 30s and 40s do show up, but they tend to be buying for their parents, not for themselves."
Vinson Wong, President, FastWillThat insight reshaped how FastWill thinks about who the product is actually for and how it should be presented. In most B2B companies, the equivalent signal sits in the heads of salespeople and goes nowhere. It isn't captured, analyzed, or used to shape what the next wave of buyers encounters. When that signal gets captured systematically and examined for patterns, the constraint becomes visible. Not as a vague category but as something specific: a particular objection that recurs, a particular stage where momentum dies, a particular gap between what buyers expect and what the business actually provides. Name it specifically. Then decide what to fix.
Once the real constraint is identified, the right fix is almost always narrower than expected, and less expensive than the broader initiatives that weren't working.
FastWill's fix wasn't a bigger ad budget. It was a B2B channel built through financial advisors and insurance agents who were already in the right conversation. The Theory of Constraints calls this "elevating" the constraint, the fourth of Goldratt's Five Focusing Steps. The fix is narrower in scope than "drive more direct conversion," and it produces a higher quality of buyer at lower acquisition cost because the trust transfer was already done by someone the buyer already listened to.
Two scenarios that play out constantly in B2B revenue stalls:
A company spending significant budget on lead generation to address a pipeline that isn't converting might find the actual constraint is a positioning problem. Buyers can't clearly articulate why this company over any other. Fixing that requires sharper messaging at the point where the decision is being made, not more leads flowing into a broken stage.
A company adding headcount to a sales team that can't close might find the constraint lives upstream. Marketing is generating problem-aware conversations when the buyers who close are already solution-aware and looking for proof. Fixing that requires content and sales enablement that meets buyers where they actually are in their thinking, not more reps working the same broken motion.
Pouring more leads into a broken conversion stage produces more work, not more revenue. Adding reps to a sales motion that can't close adds cost without adding wins. Spending behind a buyer who needs a trusted intermediary produces clicks. None of those moves addresses the thing that's actually broken.
Goldratt's framework starts with identifying the constraint. That's not a brainstorming exercise. It requires one specific question, asked seriously: where are we actually losing deals?
In our experience with B2B leadership teams, most have never asked it that way. The systems around them reward output. Activity gets measured. Constraints rarely do.
Answering the question requires examining every stage of how the business creates and closes revenue: where demand originates, how it becomes pipeline, how pipeline becomes closed business, how closed business becomes retained and expanded. One of those stages has a dominant constraint. The others are functioning adequately.
For FastWill, the stage was conversion, and the fix was a trusted-intermediary channel. For most B2B companies in a revenue stall, the stage is somewhere else. The discipline is the same. Find where deals actually stall. Build the fix there. Revenue stalls end not by adding more activity, but by removing the specific restriction that's been slowing everything down.
Revenue growth stalls when a specific constraint in the revenue system goes unaddressed. The Theory of Constraints, introduced by Eliyahu Goldratt in his 1984 book The Goal, makes the principle explicit: every process has a single dominant constraint, and total output can only improve when the constraint improves. In a revenue system, that constraint might be a positioning problem, a sales motion misaligned with where buyers actually are in their thinking, or a trust gap that marketing never closed before the first sales call. Finding it requires looking upstream from where the symptom appears.
Start with the sales conversation, not the dashboard. If salespeople are consistently re-explaining things that marketing should have answered, the constraint likely lives in positioning or messaging. If qualified buyers are entering the pipeline but not advancing, the constraint is probably in how trust is being built across the process. If close rates vary significantly across reps, the constraint may be in the sales motion itself. The pattern in the conversations almost always reveals which stage owns the problem.
A revenue constraint is the single point in your revenue system that is restricting growth. Every business has one dominant constraint at any given stage. Finding it requires capturing signal from actual buyer and sales conversations, looking for patterns in where deals slow or stop, and tracing those patterns upstream to where they originate. The Marketing & Revenue Assessment is built specifically for this: mapping the full revenue system, identifying the real constraint, and producing a clear plan that addresses it.
Adding salespeople is rarely the right first response to a revenue stall. If the constraint sits in the sales motion or the messaging that sets up sales conversations, more reps will produce more of the same result at higher cost. The question to answer first is whether current salespeople are failing because of something inside the sales function, or because of something that happened before they got involved. If the answer is the latter, more headcount won't fix it.
A demand problem means the right buyers aren't entering the system in sufficient volume. A revenue stall can happen even when demand is healthy, because the constraint is downstream. If qualified buyers are coming in and not converting, demand isn't the issue. Something in the process of moving them from aware to closed is restricting flow. The Caring.com 2025 Wills Survey illustrates this cleanly: most American adults need a will, only 24% have one, and the gap is procrastination rather than awareness.
It depends on what's causing it. The diagnostic that identifies the real constraint typically takes two to four weeks when done systematically. A positioning or messaging constraint can begin showing results within 60 to 90 days once addressed. A structural constraint in how marketing and sales are aligned may take longer to correct fully, though early improvements in deal quality and conversation clarity are usually visible within the first quarter. The key variable is whether the right thing is being fixed.
The Marketing & Revenue Assessment maps every stage of how your business creates and closes revenue, identifies the real constraint, and produces a clear plan that addresses it directly. The constraint is almost never where the client expected it.
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