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There's a minimum effective dose of customer listening, and it's far less than I've been telling people. He sent me the customer call recording as a joke. It’s a two-minute conversation about a blocked toilet. I’ve listened to it six times. My dear friend just bought a plumbing business, and I’m trying to help with marketing, but I felt blind since we haven’t started the customer interviews. The caller was panicking: “How quickly can you come out?” She didn’t even ask about m

Whenever I meet new marketers, I secretly sort them into two groups: A founder messaged me: “Hey Matt, my marketing advisor says I should implement HubSpot. What do you think?” “I think you should fire him.” Why so certain? Why so harsh? This was a pre-seed founder hustling cold outbound – 4 leads/week for his SaaS, and the consultant’s first instinct was to spend money. And that’s the red flag. Whenever I meet new marketers, I secretly sort them into two groups: People who t

How to come up with growth marketing strategies that actually work They say there's no bad ideas in a brainstorm, but we know that’s hooey. In-fact, most brainstorms have only bad ideas – random tactics, incremental tweaks, generic "best practices." Good news, the fix is simpler than you think. Start with “why not?” If you think about it… all growth work comes down to one thing: getting people to do something they're not yet doing (e.g., sign up, activate, retain, refer a fri

When founders ask me about delegation, I tell them about the time I worked with Steve Jobs.

How to win the AEO/GEO game on a startup budget – an interview with Kevin Indig Can a small company outrank the big guys? Q: Does AI search give startups an opportunity to leapfrog incumbents? Yes – but only in a niche, never head-on. One of the biggest ingredients in AI visibility is authority: "how known are you, how good is your reputation, and by how many people?" Big companies win on authority by default. But AI answers are specific to the question asked, and that's wh

Since I started this newsletter, people have now read my emails 3 million times. That’s about 11 years of reading! What do my best emails have in-common? I uploaded my best and worst performers to Claude, and discovered my best emails do five things: Grab my reader’s attention early with curiosity and a promise of value Hold attention through the email by telling a story Respect my reader’s time and intelligence Leave them with a simple action they can use right away That’s f

I love working with former scientists, but I also kind of hate it. I was reviewing an experiment recently. The new page was performing better, so I suggested we end the A/B test. "Shouldn't we wait until it's statistically significant?" she asked. “We’re not trying to publish a paper,” I replied. “We’re looking for things that are big. If an experiment takes weeks to reach significance, it’s not big. Don’t waste time chasing unnecessary precision – go look for something bigge

My best SEO post died last month. Sigh. For years, it ranked for “Growth mindset interview questions” and brought a steady stream of subscribers. Now, it’s a trickle. I had a theory… I typed that query into ChatGPT, and it spat out a brilliant answer – much better than my blog post – in three seconds. No wonder everyone's using AI to automate the hard graft of SEO. But does that actually work? tl;dr – it doesn't. To test this, Lily Ray tracked 220+ websites who use AI conten

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