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

Most SaaS leaders get trial cancellations wrong.

They think users leave because the product isn't good enough. So they add more features. Build more capabilities. Polish the UI.

But the data tells a different story.

Users rarely cancel because your product lacks value. They cancel because they didn't experience that value quickly enough, clearly enough, or in a way that made sense for their specific needs.

The distinction matters more than you think. Because if you're solving the wrong problem, no amount of product development will move your conversion rate.

Here's what actually reduces trial cancellations: systematic optimization of the experience itself.

Our latest article breaks down the five-step framework we use to audit trial experiences and identify exactly where users encounter friction.

Learn about trial optimization and get the five-step audit framework to optimize your SaaS free-trial experience, reduce cancellations, and improve co

Open article: How Do You Reduce Cancellations During SaaS Free Trials? by Jon MacDonald • 11 min read

How Do You Reduce Cancellations During SaaS Free Trials?

Sales and Marketing at CBF Labels

I'm passionate about sharing content & ideas on sales + marketing to help you level up your professional knowledge.

Outside my main role, I've been helping Ecommerce SaaS and AI companies with distribution and promotion.

If you’re looking to advertise to my audience, please send me a message so we can chat further. Thanks!

Jamie Dimond

Some years don’t reward you.
They prepare you.

The hardest years
quietly build the strongest versions of you. 
 
Trust the process you survived.

Image credit: SeekWiser_ on Twitter/X

Here’s something I learned later than I should have:

Being good isn’t always enough.

You can do solid work.
Hit the goals.
Show up prepared.

And still feel overlooked.

For a long time, I thought the answer was:
Work harder
Be more patient
Prove myself longer

But that wasn’t it.

The truth is, skill only compounds in the right environment.

In the wrong place:
Good work gets normalized
Extra effort becomes expected
Your ceiling gets set for you

In the right place:
Your strengths make sense
Your growth gets noticed
Your value actually increases

This isn’t about ego.
It’s about alignment.

Sometimes the problem isn’t your ability.
It’s the room you’re in.

And leaving isn’t quitting.
It’s choosing a place where your work can breathe.

Image credit: Mind_Essentials on Twitter/X

People call it luck.
They don’t see the attempts.

What looks like "overnight success"
is usually years of quiet failure stacked on top of each other.

Missed shots.
Rejected ideas.
Campaigns that didn’t land.
Pitches that went nowhere.
Work that never made it past the draft.

That part rarely gets shared.

But here’s the truth most people skip:

Progress doesn’t come from getting it right early.
It comes from being willing to get it wrong repeatedly.

Every win is just a failure that stayed long enough to learn.
Every breakthrough is built on things that didn’t work first.

So if you’re in the messy middle right now:
trying, 
testing, 
tweaking, 
doubting 

You’re not behind.
You’re doing the work.

And that work compounds.

Don’t call it luck.
Call it reps.

Every logo tells a story.
But not every logo speaks the same language.

Each style carries its own purpose, personality, and visual strategy —
from simple symbols to expressive characters.

Understanding the 7 logo types helps brands choose how they want to be seen and remembered.

🖼 Pictorial
Instant recognition. One symbol becomes the brand.

🔤 Lettermark
Simplicity wins. Ideal when the name is long but memorability matters.

✍️ Wordmark
Clarity first. The name is the brand, powered by typography.

🔗 Combination
Maximum flexibility. Text builds trust, symbols scale everywhere.

🛡 Emblems
Heritage and authority. Feels established and timeless.

🔺 Abstract
Meaning over literal form. Global, adaptable, open to interpretation.

🙂 Mascot
Emotional connection. Brands feel human, friendly, and memorable.

A strong logo isn’t about following trends.
It’s about choosing the visual language that fits your brand’s voice, audience, and ambition.

Credit: Kenny Song

👉 Skills matter, but a positive attitude matters more.

You can’t build a great culture with negative energy, no matter how talented your team is.
(Credit: Dr. Kevin Ham)

When building a team or scaling a business, many focus solely on talent. 
But here’s a hard truth: 
Skills without the right energy are like a beautiful car without fuel.

Working with talented people who carry negative energy can drain your motivation and damage your company culture. 

It’s easy to overlook this because their expertise shines, but the cost is real—
↳ Morale drops
↳ Trust erodes, and 
↳ Innovation stalls.

On the other hand, kind people with positive energy are priceless. 
They bring solutions instead of complaints, 
Collaboration over competition, and 
Momentum to every project.

Their positivity can inspire others and elevate your team’s performance.

Remember: 
You can teach skills, but you can’t teach someone to be kind or to bring positive energy into a room. 

Choose your collaborators wisely. 
Build a team based on values, energy, and the human heart, and success will flow naturally.

Focus on who people are, not just what they do. 
That’s where true success begins.

♻️ Repost to share the positive energy!

Success isn’t just skill.

It’s discipline.

10 things that require zero talent:

 1. Showing up on time
 
 ↳ Being late is a choice. So is being reliable.
 ↳ Punctuality shows respect for others and yourself.
 
 2. Giving full effort
 
 ↳ No shortcuts. No half-measures.
 ↳ If you’re going to do it, do it right.
 
 3. Having a strong work ethic
 
 ↳ Talent without discipline is wasted potential.
 ↳ The hardest worker wins in the long run.
 
 4. Bringing positive energy
 
 ↳ Be the person others want on their team.
 ↳ Energy is contagious. Choose wisely.
 
 5. Staying prepared
 
 ↳ Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.
 ↳ You'll raise to your level of preparation.
 
 6. Going beyond expectations
 
 ↳ The bare minimum gets you nowhere.
 ↳ The extra mile has no traffic.
 
 7. Keeping an open mind
 
 ↳ Be coachable. Feedback isn’t criticism, it’s growth.
 ↳ The moment you stop learning, you start declining.
 
 8. Showing professionalism
 
 ↳ Your attitude is your business card.
 ↳ The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
 
 9. Maintaining strong body language
 
 ↳ Confidence is seen before it’s heard.
 ↳ How you carry yourself sets the tone.
 
10. Being kind
 
 ↳ Tough and kind aren’t opposites.
 ↳ Long-term success is built on relationships.
 

You don’t need talent to master these.

Just discipline and a decision.

♻️ Repost if this resonates 

Credit: Noemi Kis✨

Life as a marketer:

Credit: Rana Bassiouni

The #1 thing that separates the best CEOs from the rest:

It's not their vision.
It's not their strategy.
It's not even their intelligence.

It's 6 decisions they make every single day.

Most people think being a CEO is about the big moves.

The acquisitions.
The product launches.
The inspiring speeches.

I used to think that too.

But after years of leading teams, I've learned the truth:

Your company is shaped by the small decisions you make repeatedly.

Not the ones that make headlines.

The ones nobody sees.

Here are the 6 that matter most:

1️⃣ Who you hire

One wrong hire drains everyone around them. One right hire elevates the entire team. No decision compounds faster than this one.

2️⃣ Who you fire

Keeping the wrong person is a decision too. Every day you wait, your best people are watching. And wondering why.

3️⃣ What you tolerate

Low standards spread like wildfire. What you accept today becomes normal tomorrow. Culture isn't built by what you say. It's built by what you allow.

4️⃣ What you say no to

Every yes costs you something. Strategy isn't just what you choose to do. It's what you choose NOT to do. Protect your focus like your future depends on it.

5️⃣ Where you spend your time

Your calendar never lies. It reveals your real priorities. If it doesn't match your goals, nothing else will.

6️⃣ Who you are when things get tough

Pressure doesn't build character. It reveals it. Your team will forget the wins. They'll never forget how you made them feel in the hard times.

You're already making these decisions.

Whether you realize it or not.

Every person you keep is a decision.

Every meeting you attend is a decision.

Every behavior you tolerate is a decision.

The question isn't whether you're making them.

It's whether you're making them on purpose.

The best CEOs don't leave these to chance.

They treat them as sacred.

Because they know the truth:

Your company will never outgrow the standards you set at the top.

Which of these defines a CEO's legacy most?

♻ If this resonates, repost to inspire others.

Credit: Eric Partaker

The best thing you can do in 2026 is to NOT set resolutions.

There’s a reason why our New Year resolutions disappear by February.

Because they’re focused on the outcome; with factors outside of our control.
So we turn the focus inwards.

Want to publish a book?

Don’t set that goal. 
Instead, set a habit of writing everyday.

Want to lose weight?

Don’t set a target weight. 
Instead, set a habit of working out everyday.

Want to get a great job?

Don’t set a job goal. 
Instead, set a habit of connecting with people on LinkedIn and Twitter everyday.

May 2026 be YOUR year.

Where you live it on your terms, at your pace, to your strengths.

May you fall in love with yourself.
And see yourself for what you always were.

YOU.

Not anyone else.
Just authentically you.

Wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Credit: Ankur Warikoo

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