Are the Growth Numbers in Press Releases Even Real?

Opening

Hey subscribers, this is Oz’s Knowledge Talking.

I want to open today with an uncomfortable question. Every day we run into press releases packed with phrases like “500% year-over-year growth,” “reached the J-curve inflection point,” or “monthly active users cross the X hundred-thousand mark.” We usually have no idea where the denominator behind these numbers comes from, or how they were measured. There’s no way to verify any of it at the moment of announcement. And every year, when audit season rolls around, some companies go quiet — or suddenly redirect attention with unrelated PR.

This pattern isn’t unique to Korea. IRL, a US social media startup that raised $170 million, bragged about 20 million users — a board investigation later found 95% of them were bots. China’s Luckin Coffee recognized $300 million in fabricated revenue in a single year, 2019. In both cases, no immediate verification mechanism kicked in until the SEC caught it — after the fact.

Recently, an interesting company showed up claiming to target exactly this gap: Objection. Backed by Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, it lets anyone dispute the factual claims in an article, podcast, or YouTube video for $2,000 a pop. The verdict gets published as an ‘Honor Index’¹​ score, visible to both the outlet and the reporter.

On the surface, this sounds compelling. A verification infrastructure has finally shown up for a market that’s been plagued by false PR/IR claims. But the deeper you look into the market design details of this tool, the more the contradictions surface. The very same mechanism works just as naturally in the opposite direction. Today, let’s unpack that gap.

📊 The Verification Gap in PR/IR — A Pattern That Repeats Every Time

First, let’s establish the market gap itself. When I was doing GTM strategy consulting, I ran into this pattern constantly: performance metrics in PR/IR materials get published with no measurement standard attached. Frankly, this kind of PR does more harm than good — it gets exposed quickly anyway, especially in a world where financials and active-user counts get refreshed on statistics sites monthly, sometimes weekly, during earnings season. Empty bravado like this doesn’t survive long.

There are a few recurring archetypes of this behavior.

• Growth rates with an undisclosed denominator: going from one person to two is technically 100% growth.
• GMV²​ with a fuzzy definition: if you don’t disclose how cancellations, refunds, and internal transactions are treated, the same business can look two or three times bigger or smaller.
• Traffic inflated by one-off events: pour ad spend into a single month, generate a traffic spike, then announce “X hundred-thousand monthly users.” These numbers get quoted verbatim by media outlets and recycled as the basis for the next funding round’s IR materials.

Does a few companies already come to mind? Let’s keep going. Every year, as audit season approaches, two patterns emerge: companies go quiet, or new PR appears to redirect attention elsewhere — a new service launch, an overseas expansion announcement, a new partnership. It’s a deliberate exploitation of the timing when audit results are delayed or relatively buried.

Overseas cases are even more extreme, but the structure is identical. IRL claimed 12 million users and raised $170 million, at one point earning a valuation of $1.17 billion. A board investigation found that 95% of the reported 20 million users were bots and automated accounts. The SEC charged the founder with fraud in 2024. Skael, a San Francisco SaaS startup, raised over $30 million over five years and was caught by the SEC for inflating its revenue figures. A former CEO of a Florida ad-tech company posted on social media that “company revenue is $10–20 million,” when actual 2021 revenue was $17,450 — a gap of nearly 1,000x. And then there’s Theranos, which everyone knows.

What do all these cases have in common? No immediate verification mechanism kicked in until the SEC caught it after the fact. Somebody needs to fill this gap. That market clearly exists.