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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

Some products are commodities. Others command huge premiums. The difference isn't features, it’s signal. Expensive products are props in a story the buyer is telling about themself. Companies can charge more when they discover that story and reinforce it. Think about these expensive brands: Patagonia gear says “I’m active, healthy, outdoorsy, eco-conscious and financially secure…husband material.” Aēsop soap in the guest bathroom whispers: “Tasteful but not flashy. Details

Five ways to turn a vitamin into a painkiller, with examples from Calm, PayPal, Vanta, Deel and Gong You think your product is a ‘vitamin,’ a 'nice to have.’ Is that a death sentence? Absolutely not! Vanta, Deel, Calm, Gong, and even PayPal all started as nice-to-haves. Now they're painkillers worth billions. Each. They didn’t change their products – they found their customers’ pain, and drew attention to it. Here’s how: Poke at the pain (Calm) : Meditation is a vitamin for

When founders ask me “how can we break through this plateau?” I tell them this story. This was a marketplace for hiring home-care workers to look after elderly relatives. Growth had been flat for a year, until a researcher noticed something uncomfortable. Their bottleneck was the search results page – people scrolled through candidates, but never clicked on anyone. That's odd. Think about it: Why would you visit a home-carer site, search, and then scroll past dozens of candid

How to inspire your team to do their best work – in 30 seconds I once quit a job that paid $1,600 a day because the founder never thanked me. In my first six months, I accelerated acquisition, lowered CPAs, improved retention and revenue per user. I hired some great people, and even helped them line up financing. Then I sat down for a 1:1 with the CEO and he unloaded: "Matt, you have a problem, we’re not growing nearly fast enough. We need to be growing 2X - 3X faster. Give m