How Paceloop decides
Paceloop refuses things. It will tell you a target is unrealistic, that your split doesn't add up, that three behaviors is the ceiling. This page is what those refusals are based on — and where we deliberately differ from the sources.
Last updated: 29 July 2026
Four rules Paceloop will not bend
Most growth tools show you more. Paceloop's job is the opposite: to hold four constraints steady while you are tempted to relax them. Every one of them is a rule the software enforces, not advice it offers.
One goal per cycle
A store runs one active cycle at a time — one goal, with at most three sub-targets that have to multiply back to it. Not because focus is a virtue, but because a list of five goals is a list of zero: when everything is a priority, the week gets allocated by whatever is loudest that morning.
One constraint, not a list of problems
Paceloop names the single constraint most limiting your goal — traffic, conversion, order value, repeat rate, or margin — and sizes the plan to that one. It does not hand you a ranked backlog of everything that could be better. If you change five things at once and the number moves, you have learned nothing about which one moved it.
Three weekly behaviors is a hard cap
The plan is capped at three behaviors for the whole cycle, and the cap is enforced at activation, not suggested in the copy. Past three weekly commitments, completion drops and the honest answer to "did you run it?" becomes "sort of" — which is the answer that teaches you nothing.
Every plan carries a cut list
Paceloop proposes what to stop doing alongside what to start, and the cuts are ticked on by default. Adding work to an already-full week without removing any is not a plan; it is a wish with a deadline attached.
The commitment cannot be edited after the fact. Once a cycle is active, the behaviors you committed to are written once and never rewritten — Paceloop has no code path that updates or deletes them. At the weekly check-in you are shown what you actually said, word for word, and asked whether it happened. This is the whole mechanism: a past commitment, confronted with the present, by name, on schedule.
Where each rule comes from
None of this is invented. Each rule traces to a body of work with a published track record, and Paceloop's contribution is turning it into something that runs against your store's actual numbers rather than a workshop whiteboard.
| What Paceloop does | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Names one constraint and sizes the plan to it, instead of ranking every weakness | Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) — throughput is set by one bottleneck; improving anything else is motion without gain |
| Pressure-tests your target and recommends a lower number when the data can't support it | Goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham) — specific and difficult goals outperform vague ones, but only while they stay believable to the person holding them |
| Requires each behavior to be concrete enough that "did you do it?" has a yes/no answer, with a weekly number attached | Implementation intentions (Gollwitzer) — "when situation, then action" survives contact with a busy week; "improve our email" does not |
| Measures weekly behaviors you control, not just the revenue number you don't, and grades pace mid-cycle rather than at the end | Published execution practice on lead measures and a fixed cadence of accountability — see further reading |
| Closes the cycle with a verdict, then reopens planning with what that cycle taught you | PDCA (Shewhart, Deming) — plan, do, check, act; a cycle that never closes never teaches |
| Treats "hit the target" as insufficient on its own, because some targets can be hit in ways that damage the store | Goals Gone Wild (Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, Bazerman) — the documented side effects of goal setting, which most goal software ignores |
| Compares your funnel against reference figures when diagnosing the constraint | Published DTC commerce benchmarks, cited in the app at the point the comparison is made |
Where we deliberately differ
Taking a method seriously means disagreeing with parts of it in public. Three places where Paceloop does not follow the source material.
No cascade, no quarterly ritual, no alignment exercise
Paceloop is not OKR software. There is no tree of company goals feeding department goals feeding personal goals, no quarterly planning season, no vision statement to align to. There is a cycle and there is a week. A five-person store does not have an alignment problem; it has a "nobody did the thing" problem, and those need different tools.
Revenue = Traffic × Conversion rate × Average order value. Repeat rate is not in that identity.
You will see the four-factor version of this equation in a lot of growth content, repeat rate bolted on at the end. It is arithmetically wrong: repeat purchases already show up inside traffic and order counts, so multiplying by them double-counts. Paceloop only accepts sub-targets that genuinely multiply back to the objective, and refuses splits that miss by more than 5% — quoting both numbers, yours and the one your split actually implies. A sub-target that cannot roll up is a second goal wearing a disguise, and the whole point of the first rule is that you get one.
The witness does not have to be a person
The execution literature assumes your commitment is confronted by teammates in a weekly meeting. That is one implementation, not the requirement. The requirement is three properties: the commitment is repeated back word for word, the question is asked on schedule rather than when someone remembers, and the answer is recorded somewhere it cannot be quietly revised. Software is better than people at the first and third, and worse at the social weight of the second. So Paceloop does the parts it is better at, and stays out of the way of the part your team does better.
What Paceloop does not do
The limits are as load-bearing as the rules, and stating them is cheaper than being caught not doing them.
- It does not learn from your history, and it does not learn across stores. The behaviors it proposes come from a curated playbook of weekly lead measures with a long published track record in commerce. What is personalised is the arithmetic: the constraint is diagnosed from your last 90 days, and the numbers in each recommendation are yours, not an average of somebody else's.
- It shows you your own history; it does not silently retune on it. Once you have closed a cycle, a behavior you are offered again is labelled with what actually happened last time — kept, skipped, or mixed. That is information for you. It does not change what gets proposed or in what order.
- It never defaults to "spend more". No plan Paceloop generates opens with "increase ad budget". Paid acquisition is a lever you can pull; it is not a diagnosis, and an independent coach that always arrives at "buy more traffic" is not independent.
- It does not fill in numbers it cannot read. If your store has no session data, Paceloop says conversion rate is unreadable — it does not estimate one. If there is not enough history to name a constraint with confidence, the answer is "insufficient data", not a confident guess. A metric shown as unavailable is a feature working correctly.
- It cannot change your store's data. Paceloop's permissions cover analytics, products and inventory — plus writing a goal into your Shopify Analytics targets, so the number you commit to appears where you already look. It cannot create, edit or delete products, orders, customers, inventory or settings. See the privacy policy for the exact permissions.
Further reading
If you want the primary sources rather than our compression of them:
- Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal (1984) — constraints, in novel form
- Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. Latham, A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance (1990)
- Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling, The 4 Disciplines of Execution (2012) — the widely used treatment of lead measures, scoreboards and weekly cadence
- Peter M. Gollwitzer, "Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans", American Psychologist (1999)
- Lisa D. Ordóñez et al., "Goals Gone Wild", Academy of Management Perspectives (2009)
Paceloop is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by any of the authors, publishers, or organisations above. We read the work and built something with an opinion about it.
Try it against your own numbers
The audit is free: set a goal, get it pressure-tested against your last 90 days, see your constraint and the plan sized to it. If the answer is "your target doesn't hold up", you will have learned that for nothing.