Fanatical in working out and reading a book with chamomile tea and a scented candle.

My day usually starts with a run or a high-intensity workout, a cold shower and a 10-minute meditation session. After that, I dive into working at my agency D-DOUBLEU MEDIA.

We help 7-9 figure Ecommerce businesses scale through performance creatives and paid media.

Dennis W.

You're not a creative strategist.

You're someone who screenshots competitor ads and calls it "research."

Strategy is understanding why something works.

Copying what works is not strategy.

It's plagiarism with a marketing title.

If your entire creative process is "let's try what they're doing" — you're a copycat, not a strategist.

Build original angles or admit you're just remixing other people's homework.

undefined undefined

Slashing acquisition costs via performance creatives and paid media for 7-9 figure Ecommerce brands.

Unpopular opinion:

Most founders shouldn't be running their own ads.

Not because they can't learn.

Because the opportunity cost is insane.

Every hour you spend in Ads Manager is an hour you didn't spend on product, team, or strategy.

You're not saving money by doing it yourself.

You're spending your most valuable resource on your lowest-leverage activity.

Hire it out. Stay in your zone.

Dennis Willeboordse 👨🏼‍🦰

True story:

Brand came to us spending $2K/day. Stuck. Couldn't scale past it for 5 months.

Their diagnosis: "The market is saturated."

Our diagnosis: One winning ad carrying the entire account. No system to find more winners.

We didn't touch the budget.

We rebuilt their creative process from scratch. Research-driven angles. Structured testing. Iteration system.

90 days later: $8K/day. Same market. Same product.

The market wasn't saturated.

Their creative system was.

The 5 reasons people don't buy:

1. They don't know you exist
2. They don't understand what you sell
3. They don't believe it works
4. They don't believe it works for them
5. They don't believe it's worth the price

Your ads should solve ONE of these per awareness level.

Unaware? Solve #1.
Problem aware? Solve #2.
Solution aware? Solve #3.
Product aware? Solve #4.
Most aware? Solve #5.

One ad trying to solve all five converts no one.

Focused ads convert everyone they're meant for.

Every winning ad answers one of these:

1. Why should I care? (Hook)
2. Why should I believe you? (Proof)
3. Why should I buy now? (Offer)
4. Why should I buy from you? (Differentiation)

If your ad doesn't answer at least one clearly — it won't convert.

If it answers all four, it'll scale.

That's the whole game.

Hot take:

Most ecom brands shouldn't be running ads at all.

Weak product. No differentiation. Negative margins at scale.

Ads just expose the problem faster.

You're not one winning creative away from success.

You're one honest conversation away from realizing your business model doesn't work.

Paid ads are gasoline.

If your house is on fire, more gas won't help.

UGC is not a strategy.

It's a format.

Brands hiding behind "authentic content" because they're too lazy to do real research.

Most UGC is just pretty people holding products saying nothing.

That's not authenticity. That's aesthetic laziness with a trendy name.

The UGC that works? Built on customer research and real angles.

The rest is just technically acceptable garbage.

This will upset people.

Good.

I'm not here to validate bad business models.

Dropshipping can be a starting point. But if you're still running the same operation 2 years in with zero moat, you're not building, you're gambling.

The market rewards people who solve problems.

Not people who find products before others do.

Your creative team is brainstorming hooks.

Your competitors are studying the ad library.

The brands printing money are reading 3-star Amazon reviews.

Here's what nobody tells you about reviews:

5-star reviews are useless for ads. Written by fans who were already sold.

1-star reviews are useless for ads. Written by people who should never have bought.

3 and 4-star reviews? That's where your next winning angle lives.

These are written by skeptics who bought anyway. People who had real objections but something convinced them.

They'll tell you:
→ What almost stopped them from buying
→ What finally pushed them over the edge
→ What surprised them about the product
→ Who the product is actually for

That's not a review. That's a creative brief.

I wrote a full breakdown on how to extract angles from reviews and turn them into ads that convert.

Your competitors are studying the ad library. Your agency is "brainstorming" hooks. Meanwhile, the brands printing money are reading 3-star Amazon rev

The Gold Mine Everyone Ignores: Why 3-Star Reviews Are Worth More Than Your Entire Creative Team

A client asked me last week: "What's the one thing that matters most for scaling?"

I gave them a boring answer. But it's the truth.

Customer research.

Not the creative. Not the media buying. Not the offer.

The research that informs all of it.

Every winning ad I've ever seen started with an insight about the customer. Something specific. Something emotional. Something most competitors miss.

The brands that scale aren't more creative.

They're more curious.

They talk to customers. Read reviews obsessively. Mine Reddit threads. Study cancellation surveys.

Then they turn that into ads that feel like mind-reading.

That's not talent. It's process.

And almost nobody does it.

The "UGC creator" industry is a scam and nobody wants to say it.

Most UGC is just attractive people reading scripts they don't understand to audiences they've never researched.

That's not authenticity. That's acting with extra steps.

The UGC that works is built on customer research, real angles, and strategic briefs.

The rest is just technically acceptable content that makes brands feel like they're doing something.

Harsh? Maybe.

True? Absolutely.

Unpopular opinion:

Most media buyers are just expensive button pushers.

They optimize what's already there.
They don't create what should be there.

A great creative strategist will outperform a great media buyer 10 to 1.

But media buyers are easier to hire.

So brands keep buying the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

You're not an entrepreneur.

You're a Shopify store owner with a supplier in China and a prayer.

Entrepreneurship is solving real problems.

Dropshipping the same product as 400 other stores with slightly different branding is not a business.

It's a coin flip with extra steps.

If your entire competitive advantage is "better ads" you don't have a business.

You have a temporary arbitrage that's about to collapse.

Build something defensible or get out.

"We're testing."

No. You're guessing with a budget.

Testing has hypotheses.
Testing has structure.
Testing has learning built in.

What you're doing is throwing creatives at the wall and praying.

That's not testing.

That's gambling with a content calendar.

You're not a media buyer.

You're a dashboard watcher who occasionally changes a number.

Adjusting budgets and blaming CPMs is not a skill.

It's babysitting with extra tabs open.

You're not "building a brand."

You're running a Shopify store with a Canva logo and an inconsistent Instagram grid.

A brand has:
- A point of view
- A reason to exist beyond profit
- Customers who would miss it if it disappeared

If your customers would switch for 10% off elsewhere, you don't have a brand.

You have a transaction with aesthetic packaging.

"Our product is for everyone."

Then it's for no one.

You're not being ambitious. You're being lazy.

Picking a niche is scary because it means saying no.

But saying yes to everyone means your message is so diluted it resonates with nobody.

The riches are in the niches isn't a cliché.

It's math.

Narrow the target. Sharpen the message. Watch conversions climb.

"Everyone" is not a customer segment.

It's a cope.

Eugene Schwartz wrote about awareness levels in 1966.

Brands still don't get it.

They run one message to everyone. Then blame the algorithm.

Here's reality:

Someone ready to buy needs an offer.
Someone comparing needs proof.
Someone exploring needs positioning.
Someone hurting needs hope.
Someone asleep needs a wake-up call.

Five different people. Five different messages.

You're running one ad and wondering why it doesn't scale.

It's not the platform.
It's not the product.
It's not the market.

It's you. Talking to everyone. Resonating with no one.

Fix this and watch your "saturated market" open up.

The dirty secret about "scaling agencies":

Most of them scale your spend, not your profit.

Higher budgets = higher retainers.

Your ROAS drops but their invoice doesn't.

Then they show you "total revenue" screenshots while your net margin bleeds.

Revenue is vanity.
Profit is sanity.
Your agency reports are designed to hide the difference.

Ask for profit metrics. Watch them squirm.

Why your retargeting doesn't convert:

You're showing the same ad to people who already said no.

That's not retargeting. That's nagging.

Smart retargeting:

- Different angle than the first ad
- Addresses why they didn't buy
- New proof, new objection handling
- Feels like a conversation, not a repeat

If someone didn't buy after seeing your ad 3 times, showing it a 4th time won't help.

Change the message. Answer what's holding them back.

CEO The Good – Optimization for top brands like Nike, Xerox, Adobe, The Economist & many more | Author & Speaker | 6'7" 🏀 | Jr Olympic 🥇🥋 | jonmacdonald.com | 📘 Latest Book 👉 thegood.com/oito

Every bad digital experience costs you money. My mission is simple: remove them all until conversion becomes inevitable.

I founded The Good 16+ years ago to turn user insights into revenue. We're the trusted Digital Experience Optimization advisory for household names like Adobe, Nike, Xerox, Intel, and The Economist.

Together, we've generated hundreds of millions in additional revenue by optimizing the full digital journey from first touch to retention.

I've written three best-selling books on conversion optimization and am a frequent keynote speaker at Google, Autodesk, and industry events worldwide.

Also building tools for UX researchers and consultants. Currently in beta: Clipses.ai. Turn user interview transcripts into shareable video clips in minutes. Helping teams eliminate hours of rewatching footage.

Folks will tell you I love to compete: I'm a former college basketball player (and still playing on a club travel team) and won the USA Jr Olympic gold medal in Taekwondo when I was 10. But, business is the ultimate sport.

Book a 15-minute optimization strategy call → https://thegood.com/contact/

📨 DM me to start improving the digital journey of your website or app… or to debate LeBron vs Jordan as the GOAT.

Jon MacDonald

I'm over 40. I still play on a travel basketball team. But not for nostalgia. It's survival.

Running a business means carrying stress you can't physically release.

You can't outwork a client who ghosts you. You can't fight a bad quarter. The competitive energy builds up... and you just absorb it.

For 16 years, I've needed somewhere to put that pressure.

The basketball court is mine.

After my hardest days, I lace up and forget everything else. I have to. When someone's driving to the basket, I can't think about the deal that fell through or the hire who didn't work out.

The game forces me into the present moment. Nothing else exists.

Win or lose, my company is fine the next morning.

That mental separation is the point.

Exercise alone won't do this. Running doesn't reset my brain the same way. But real competition, with real stakes and real opponents, flips a switch.

The buildup releases. Perspective returns.

Every founder I know who's lasted 15+ years has something like this. A place where competitive energy goes and business stress can't follow.

Find yours.

Digital Experience Optimization + AI Browser Agent Optimization + Entrepreneurship Lessons | 3x Author | Speaker | Founder @ The Good – helping Adobe, Nike, The Economist & more increase revenue for 16+ years

I've been reading r/Entrepreneur all month. The burnout is relentless.

Founders doing everything right. Exercise. Sleep. Healthy eating. Still completely exhausted.

One CEO just closed a funding round and doubled their team. Should feel great. Instead, lower than ever.

Another said they can't afford extended time away. Too much to do.

2026 is starting heavy.

The common thread: isolation.

Carrying the weight of employees' mortgages. Investors' expectations. Making decisions that affect everyone while having no one to process it with.

I know this spiral. I've been running The Good for 16 years.

Working less didn't help me. Optimizing my morning routine didn't either. Finding people who actually understand the weight did.

Entrepreneurs' Organization. Smaller mastermind groups and forums. People who've faced the same decisions and will tell me when I'm being an idiot.

Not for networking. Not for referrals. For reality checks when I've been too deep in my own head for too long.

The founders burning out aren't weak. They're just alone.

If that's you right now, find your people. It's the best investment you'll make this year.

Trevor Lawrence failed spectacularly. But still scored a touchdown.

Watch the play.

He stumbles. Crashes to the turf. Gets back up. Runs it into the end zone.

That's optimization in seven seconds.

Your biggest wins hide behind your worst failures.

Failure is the engine of optimization. Yet most companies treat it like a disease. They punish mistakes. Hide poor results. Celebrate only wins.

They're optimizing for the wrong metric.

Every failed test reveals what customers actually want. Not what we assumed they wanted.

Jeff Bezos put it simply: "Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day."

Research confirms less than 50% of experiments at Amazon, Microsoft, and similar companies improve the metrics they're designed to improve.

Most experiments fail. Even at the best companies.

The difference is they don't treat failure as defeat. They treat it as data.

Google cancels most new products. Netflix tests hundreds of features you'll never see. Booking.com runs over 1,000 experiments at any given moment.

They fail fast, learn faster, and win biggest.

The magic happens when you systematize failure.

Make it cheap. Make it frequent. Make it expected.

Run that risky play. Test boldly. Document everything.

Because the only real failure is never running the experiment at all.

Claude has made half of my authority playbook worthless.

I've spent 16+ years building credibility as an entrepreneur. Published 3 books. Spoke at conferences. Built a content engine.

Half of those signals mean nothing now.

Books? Anyone can have AI write one in a weekend.

Conference keynotes? The audience can ask Claude the same questions afterward and get a more detailed answer.

Thought leadership content? We're all drowning in it.

The old authority formula (credentials + content = trust) is breaking.

But here's what I've noticed still works:

Original frameworks. The thinking you've done that nobody else has.

Specific results. Numbers from real work, not just case studies, with specifics on how you got there.

Relationships built over years. The people who've seen you perform.

Decision-making under uncertainty. AI can synthesize information. It can't (yet) make the final call.

The entrepreneurs building real authority in 2026 aren't collecting credentials.

They're demonstrating judgment.

I'm considering writing another book. Not for the "author" credential.

For the thinking it forces me to do. For the frameworks that come out of it. For the conversations it starts.

The credential is worthless. But the process... that is still invaluable.

You can improve conversion rate while making customers hate you.

I've seen it happen.

The dashboard showed green. Time on site up. Funnel flowing. Revenue growing.

But support tickets told a different story.

Customers weren't happy. They were confused. The extra time on site was people hunting for answers they couldn't find.

Analytics can't see suffering. But AI can scale the search.

So, use AI to cluster your qualitative data.

Feed it support tickets, on-site search queries, call transcripts, negative reviews.

Look for repeated phrases that predict churn:

"I thought it would..."
"I can't find..."
"Why is it asking for..."
"I already entered that..."

These patterns reveal friction your funnel metrics hide completely.

If your team only reviews numbers, you'll keep shipping silent damage.

Here's a prompt you can copy to get started:

"Analyze these [500] support tickets. Group them by common user frustration themes. For each theme, provide: 1) the specific phrases users repeat, 2) estimated frequency, 3) which part of the product/journey it relates to. Rank by potential business impact."

Paste your data. See what your dashboard can't show you.

I found a client's bestseller buried in a 47 item dropdown. But it drove 90% of their sales.

This is choice overload in action.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz proved that too many options paralyze decisions. When faced with overwhelming choices, customers don't choose better. They choose nothing.

Our client had exactly this problem.

Their "Shop" dropdown listed dozens of products with no hierarchy. Just an alphabetical wall of text.

Their flagship product sat somewhere in the middle. Invisible.

The serial positioning effect explains why this matters. We remember the first and last items in any list. Everything in the middle blurs together.

So we restructured their navigation.

Core products moved to the first and last positions. Secondary items organized by customer intent, not internal categories.

Result: $1.4 million in additional annual revenue.

Same products, same traffic, and same checkout.

The only change was removing a psychological barrier customers couldn't articulate.

Your customers make 35,000 decisions daily. By the time they reach your site, they're already exhausted.

The fix is simpler than you think:

Limit top-level nav to 7 items (the brain's processing limit).
Put your most important items first and last. 
Structure around customer goals, not internal departments.

Don't ask them to work harder. Guide them to what they need.

I poured 15 years of hard-earned lessons into Behind The Click. None of them were "the big idea."

First-time authors think they need one transformative insight to justify a book.

That's backwards.

A book isn't one idea explained at length. It's dozens of smaller ideas organized into a coherent argument.

Behind The Click has 4 main sections: Discovery, Information-Gathering, Decision-Making, and Post-Purchase.

Each section answers different questions customers ask along their journey. Each question required its own chapter of tactics and psychology.

That's not one big idea. That's a system of interconnected insights.

Here's the test I use: if you can explain your expertise in one conversation, you don't have a book yet. If explaining it takes 20 different conversations, you do.

My first book started as one simple belief: companies should sell, not just market. That belief required exploring awareness strategies, sales psychology, digital journeys, and conversion principles.

One belief. Dozens of supporting ideas.

Your "big idea" isn't a book.

It's the thesis that ties your smaller ideas together.

Our best product ideas never came from market research.

They came from watching clients struggle with the same problem over and over.

At The Good, we've run thousands of customer interviews across 16+ years. The analysis was always valuable. The video editing to create highlight reels was always... painful.

Researchers spending entire afternoons hunting through footage to find one quote. And, we heard the same complaint from internal teams at client after client.

So our team built Clipses. Interview footage to highlight reels in minutes, not hours.

This is how The Good Ventures portfolio works. UserInput, CommerceCritiques, now Clipses. All born from patterns we saw repeatedly in client work.

Consultants have an unfair advantage for building products.

You see problems dozens of times across different industries, team sizes, and budgets. That pattern recognition is more valuable than surveys or focus groups.

You're not guessing what people need. You're watching them struggle with it in real time.

If you've seen the same frustration 10+ times across different clients, pay attention.

That's a product signal hiding in plain sight.

Time is money, but in SaaS, it's also the key to success.

Over half of downloaded apps are uninstalled within 30 days. Why? Users aren't experiencing value quickly enough.

Accelerating time-to-value isn't just about faster onboarding. It's about creating those "Aha!" moments that turn casual users into loyal customers.

The best SaaS companies are mastering this art through personalized experiences, optimized registration processes, and strategic quick wins.

They're not just building products. They're crafting journeys that lead users to value faster than ever before.

Are you still making users wait to see your product's true potential?

Learn how to speed up your time-to-value and reduce churn in our latest article. Your users (and your bottom line) will thank you.

Click through to discover the strategies that are transforming user experiences and driving SaaS success.

View newsletter: Digital Journey Insights

Learn how strategies like optimizing onboarding, personalizing the user experience, and implementing quick wins can improve SaaS product time-to-value

Open article: Accelerating Time-to-Value: How SaaS Products Get Users to ‘Aha!’ Moments Faster by Jon MacDonald • 8 min read

Accelerating Time-to-Value: How SaaS Products Get Users to ‘Aha!’ Moments Faster

taplio

The Battle

Dennis W.

Jon MacDonald

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreDennis W.'s LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJon MacDonald's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Dennis W.

Jon MacDonald

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dennis W.'s LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJon MacDonald's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDennis W.'s LinkedIn Performance