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Essays, playbooks, and short notes on software, digital marketing, and start-up operating. One new piece each week.
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Showing 71–80 of 109.
The CAC-to-LTV Sanity Check Most Founders Skip Until Month 9
The conversation happens in almost every early-stage engagement I take on. A founder shows me their performance dashboard. CAC is trending down. They are pleased. I ask what the LTV is. They give me a number. I ask how they calculated it. They cite average ord
Claude Prompt Caching: Production Patterns That Cut Costs 80%
Prompt caching is the single highest-ROI feature in the Claude API for production workloads. Used well, it cuts the cost of high-traffic endpoints by 70-90% and shaves hundreds of milliseconds off latency. Used poorly. or ignored. it leaves the equivalent of a
Why Most Performance Marketing Reports Lie, and the Three Metrics That Don't
I have audited a lot of marketing accounts on behalf of founders who suspected something was wrong. The accounts usually come with a reporting package: monthly PDFs, Google Data Studio dashboards, weekly email summaries. The reports uniformly look good. Green
The Landing Page Audit I Run Before Spending a Dollar on Paid Traffic
I have been brought in to fix underperforming paid campaigns more times than I can count, and in roughly half of those engagements the problem was not in the campaign. It was on the landing page. The ads were fine. The targeting was acceptable. The budget was
Email Lists Still Outperform Everything. Here's How to Build One Without a Lead Magnet Treadmill
Email is the channel that never dies and never gets the credit it deserves. Every few years a new platform emerges and the industry declares email obsolete. Then the data comes back: email still produces $35-$42 for every dollar invested, which is higher than
Brand Positioning for SMBs: A One-Page Framework That Survives Contact With Reality
Every agency positioning engagement I have seen follows the same arc. Week one is a discovery workshop. Weeks two through four are competitive audits, archetype selection, and brand voice development. Week six is a 40-slide presentation deck. The client nods a
TikTok Ads for B2B: When It Actually Works (and the Three Times It Doesn't)
The first time I ran TikTok ads for a B2B client, it was something close to an accident. The client was a SaaS tool for restaurant managers. We were running Meta and Google, both performing reasonably well, and the marketing director asked me to try TikTok bec
Organic SEO After AI Overviews: What Stopped Working and What Replaced It
Google's AI Overviews rolled out to US search results in May 2024. By Q3 2024 I was looking at Google Search Console data for a content-heavy client site and watching informational traffic drop 35% over three months with no meaningful change in technical healt
The Creative Testing Cadence That Beat My Agency-Built Funnel by 40%
In early 2023 I was paying an agency $4,800 per month to run Meta ads for a SaaS product I had an equity stake in. They were competent. The campaigns were structured correctly. The ROAS was defensible. But after 12 months the CPL had drifted from $41 to $63 an
Attribution Is Broken. Here's the Three-Number Dashboard I Use Instead
I have sat through dozens of attribution model debates and come to a firm conclusion: every attribution model is wrong, most are also useless, and the energy spent perfecting them would be better invested in improving the marketing itself. Last-click attributi
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