STEAL THIS.

Early in my career, we used this horrible thing called WebTrends that measured nonsense like "hits" and "time spent on page." Eventually, I realized those reports were a Rorschach test – I could see anything I wanted in them. So I ditched them and started with business outcomes, working backwards. Why am I telling you this? Because marketing analytics feel the same way today. AI overviews reduce search clicks. Social platforms suppress links. Apple, GDPR and LLMs all block tr

Are your smartest people working on your hardest problem? The best marketer I ever hired had zero marketing experience. He studied physics at Cambridge and cracked a $100M churn problem that had stumped us for 17 years. We kept trying the usual stuff – retention campaigns, win-back offers, incentives – all to no avail. Instead of reaching for another tactic, he reached for a pen and paper and studied the problem. Who exactly was churning? When? Why? He excluded tiny merchants

My friend Erin used to run experiments at Booking.com. She said they tested 1,000 ideas per week, and 91% failed. My first reaction: "Wow, if you test aggressively, you'll be wrong a lot." I completely missed her point. On a bike ride last week, it hit me: Testing didn't cause them to be wrong, it caused them to discover they were wrong. Those ideas would’ve been bad whether they’d tested them or not. But Booking.com isn't uniquely stupid. So if 91% of their ideas are wrong,

Their whole business was: Customers install the app, go to a pub, show a QR code, get free beer. (Their revenue came from pubs paying for new customers.) The only problem – people wouldn’t take the free beer. Crazy, right? We suggested their Head of Marketing, Hannah Parvaz , talk to some customers:​​​​​ “Free beer? What’s the catch?” “Is it some weird new microbrew?” “When someone offers to buy me a drink… he expects something in return.” Once she understood the problem, the

How to tell if your ads are actually working so you can find and cut your least efficient spend A quick primer on incrementality testing “Should we just turn off all our ads and see what happens?” Every founder and CFO wonders "Does our ad spend actually bring new customers? Or are we paying to acquire customers who would have purchased anyway?" Good news… this has been tested. In a recent study , Dropbox cut all mobile and paid search (SEM) ads in the USA, and compared the r

My co-founder Nopadon has mentored hundreds of teams who have hit plateaus – and he’s spotted a handful of root causes behind myriad symptoms. He fed transcripts of these sessions into Claude, and found 8 root-cause blockers – different ones depending on your stage and business model. Scroll to the section that's relevant for you👇 1. Early-stage B2B Vague Target Customer: You have an idea of who’d buy your product, but can't narrow it down to a particular job title, type,

AppSumo just released their most popular AI marketing tools, based on 63,410 searches: Do you see what's wrong with this list? Most teams are using AI to automate the exact tactics that AI is making obsolete: SEO: AI makes content creation easy while AI answers are killing organic traffic. LinkedIn: DMs are so full of AI-personalized garbage, nobody reads them anymore. Email: AI spam filters are as good at blocking outreach as AI is at writing it. Video: We scroll past an

An 8-figure CEO asked me, “Should I fire my copywriter? Claude can do a pretty good job for $30/month.” “It depends…” I responded. (Of course it does. 😏) I told him the real problem isn’t “AI vs. copywriters” – it’s that most writers crank out mediocre work: SEO pages that never rank Social posts nobody reads Emails nobody opens “If that’s what you’re paying for, then for sure, switch to AI. Or better yet, just stop. Stop pumping out crap!” Good writing is one of the most l

Skip-level meetings are a powerful under-used tool. Here's what they're for, and how to run one. Layoffs were coming, and my boss handed me a list and a question: “Would you rather have these people or their headcount?” It was a list of people who were on the chopping block, and I could “save” them or use their headcount to hire new people. I kept most of them. Not because I’m nice, though I am. I knew something the re-org gods couldn't see from their spreadsheet: these weren

The most powerful referral incentive isn't money, it's a cognitive bias. I once built a referral program that cost nothing, required no special software, and got 1 in 50 users to refer a friend, without promising them any incentive. Most referral program examples rely on cash or credits. This one didn't. The reason it worked was simple. The commitment & consistency bias. In 1966, two Stanford researchers went door-to-door asking homeowners to put a massive "DRIVE CAREFULLY

Trust isn't built with expensive ads. There's a dangerous myth in startups: That trust can be bought. Nonsense. Big budgets don't buy trust. (Does anybody trust Meta? Ryanair? Wells Fargo?) The good news? This isn’t about working harder. It’s about narrowing the problem. The trick is to stop thinking about "trust" as a big, fuzzy abstraction. Break down the problem, think of it as a specific set of people with a specific set of doubts. And here’s how you win them over. Firs

Most experiments fail, but my winners have one surprising thing in common… As I was writing my book , my editor noticed something weird: I included examples of the best hypotheses I’d seen, ones that led to the biggest breakthroughs. “Did you notice these are all negative?” she observed. They all followed a pattern: “We believe people are not signing up because…” “We believe people are not activating because…” “Is there any reason these are all phrased in the negative?” I