I was fixated on ROI throughout most of the 2010s, before my risk management spirit took over and introduced COI as an equally important KPI.
What is COI?
馃摋 COI stands for “Cost of Inaction”.
It wasn’t part of my risk management training in 2011, though I’ve applied all early principles into building a tech consultancy for high-traffic WordPress-based applications (many of which have transitioned to our RevOps roadmaps).
While ROI focuses on getting from X to 1.2X, 1.5X, 2X, 3X, 5X, or 10X, COI is a mix of defensibility and moderated growth.
Some examples:
1. If your product roadmap stops, competitors will take over and gradually take over your entire user base
2. If your platform isn’t up to date, you’re endangered by software leaks and data loss (and lawsuits/losing trust)
3. If your engineering team isn’t up to date with the latest copilot/vibe opportunities, other teams will accelerate faster
4. If you don’t make use of the latest and greatest personalization features, data enrichment solutions, or referral networks, your competitors will, and the same won’t work in the future
馃憠 Investing in COI-prevention initiatives is not just “paying for bookkeeping and legal because we have to.” It’s a common fallacy.
Traditional ROI presumes that growth is flat or consistent, requires no fuel, and can remain steady.
COI prevents this model from failing.
If you bump paid ads from $5M to $10M a year, with no product development or scalability:
– your churn will go up
– CAC will go high
– LTV will go down
Seemingly ROI-oriented metrics will crumble due to COI.
I’ve covered some principles in this week’s newsletter, as several of our 2026 contracts now include a separate COI bucket in parallel with traditional RevOps/engineering plans + on top of maintenance and support hours.
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System resilience: ROI vs. COI (examples)
Mario Peshev
