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 built my first website in 1996. Anyone can do that now in 5 minutes.

But nobody vibe coded Adobe's trust in us.

I've heard the same prediction for 16 years. WordPress will kill agencies. Then Squarespace. Then no-code tools. Now AI coding.

Each time, the pundits focus on the wrong thing. They see the interface and assume that's the product.

It never is.

The interface is maybe 5% of the value. The other 95% took years to build.

Enterprise relationships. Regulatory knowledge. Institutional expertise from hundreds of engagements. SOC 2 compliance. The phone call at 2am when something breaks.

There are five things you can't vibe code: brand trust, distribution, regulatory compliance, proprietary data, and customer relationships.

I'd add a sixth. The judgment that comes from optimizing digital experiences for Adobe, Nike, Xerox, and The Economist over 16 years.

A weekend coder can build a checkout flow. They can't tell you why it's underperforming or what to change. That takes pattern recognition from thousands of tests.

Technology always lowers the barrier to building. It never eliminates the need for expertise.

My business has grown through every "this kills that" cycle. I expect this one will be no different.

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 spent 16 years optimizing digital experiences for brands like Nike, Adobe, and Xerox.

But the next wave of "visitors" to their websites won't be human.

AI agents are already browsing sites, researching products, and making purchase decisions on behalf of real buyers. Most enterprise websites aren't ready for them.

Profound just raised $96M to fix that. And I'm fired up about it.

Engineers have Cursor. Lawyers have Harvey. Marketers now have Profound.

Their agents aren't just tools. They're autonomous workers that collaborate across your entire marketing team. AEO, SEO, content, PR, demand gen.

That's a massive unlock. We're talking 10x productivity potential for lean marketing teams who are already stretched thin.

Figma, Walmart, Ramp, U.S. Bank are already investing here. The enterprise demand for AI-powered marketing infrastructure is real and accelerating.

Congrats to the Profound team. Answer Engine Optimization is one of the fastest-moving categories in marketing right now, and the brands that figure this out early will have a massive edge.

More on the raise 👉 https://lnkd.in/gtAGfJ5E

I spent 16 years fixing the same conversion failures for Nike, Adobe, and The Economist. But I never realized I was doing product research.

Every engagement at The Good followed a pattern:

A brand calls. Visitors aren't converting. We dig in, find the friction, and optimize it away. Then the next brand calls with the exact same problems: Broken onboarding. Confusing pricing pages. Checkout flows that leak revenue at every step.

After a few hundred of these, something shifted. I stopped seeing individual client problems and started seeing product opportunities.

That realization built The Good Ventures.

UserInput was born from watching brands waste weeks waiting for user testing results they needed in days.

Clipses came from watching researchers spend entire afternoons hunting through interview footage to find one quote. We had the same problem internally.

PredictiveAX came from an even stranger pattern. We'd optimize a site for human visitors, then watch AI agents completely fail on the same pages. Different user. Same site. Opposite outcomes.

Every product in the portfolio started as a manual fix we repeated too many times. The pattern recognition from client work was the market research.

Most founders build first, then hunt for customers. Consultants have the opposite problem. We already have validated pain. We just need to build.

If you keep solving the same problem across different clients, you already have what most founders spend years searching for: validated demand.

I watched COVID nearly destroy 11 years of building The Good. But that crisis built something better.

In 2020, our services business all but shut down for a quarter. Clients froze budgets overnight. Projects vanished.

One revenue stream. One point of failure.

I'd spent a decade helping brands reduce risk through optimization. Testing small changes. Measuring results. Never betting everything on one idea.

Yet my own company was one giant bet.

In 2021, I launched The Good Ventures. A portfolio of small, focused products. Each born from patterns we kept seeing across client work.

No massive funding rounds. No 18-month builds. Small bets with clear metrics and fast feedback.

Jeff Bezos built Amazon's dominance through thousands of small experiments, not moonshots. I applied that same principle to venture building.

Some of our bets took off. Others taught expensive lessons. The portfolio absorbs both.

My EO forum helped me see this clearly. Several founders ran diversified businesses. They weathered downturns that nearly broke mine.

One revenue stream feels like focus.

It's actually fragility.

Diversify like you'd optimize: small bets, real data, and the willingness to kill what isn't working.

I laughed at this LinkedIn reply. But Okta data shows 350 SaaS apps per enterprise.

The reply: "I can now create the same tool in about a day. SaaS is over."

This take is everywhere right now. B2B SaaS stocks lost $1 trillion in value this year. The narrative feels convincing.

The data tells a different story.

Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers show corporate spending on self-built software dropped from 50% to just 15%.

Companies don't want to build tools. Even when they can.

Because building is the easy part. Maintaining, securing, updating, supporting, and scaling is where the real work lives.

That "one day" to build becomes one year to get SOC 2 certified. Two years to earn enterprise procurement approval. Five years to build the integration ecosystem customers depend on.

The average large company runs 350-400 SaaS apps because each one solved a problem they didn't want to own.

It's all been said before... WordPress was going to replace agencies. No-code was going to replace developers. AI is going to replace SaaS.

Each prediction confuses the ability to build with the ability to operate.

SaaS isn't dying. The bar for earning enterprise trust is just getting higher.

I got to be one of five returning guests who interviewed Sani for the No Hacks 5-year anniversary episode.

Five years. 218 episodes. Zero hacks.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened because Sani has spent five years doing the work, sharing what he learns, and earning trust the hard way.

Slobodan is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to the agentic web. He's also one of the most generous with his time and knowledge.

We're building PredictiveAX together on the side, helping companies prepare their websites for AI browser agents. Working alongside him has been one of the highlights of my career. 

Listen to this episode. It's packed with insights on where the agentic web is headed and what you need to do about it now.

Congrats on 5 years, Sani 🎉

We haven’t quite figured out how AI understand and uses the web we built for ourselves. I’m trying to do that. | Keynote speaker | Host of the No Hacks podcast (200+ eps)

After five years and 218 episodes I couldn't think of a better way celebrate than letting other people ask the questions for once.

I invited five previous guests to interview me for the anniversary episode. Kelly Wortham, Iqbal Ali, Talia Wolf, Jon MacDonald, Shiva Manjunath. Five different people, five different angles on the agentic web. One of them tried to convince me the whole thing is overhyped. (It didn't work)

Here's what kept coming up across all five conversations:

The basics are the strategy. A fully functional website built for humans gets you 80-90% ready for AI agents. Accessibility, semantic HTML, schema, page speed. The stuff you've been putting off? That's optimization now.

AI agents are already between users and websites. Chrome has 3 billion users and started shipping Gemini. Apple is putting AI into every device. There will be an AI layer in front of every interaction. Your website needs to be discovered, cited, and usable by that layer.

WebMCP is one of those things that could change everything. Right now it takes an AI agent 3-5 minutes to fill a basic web form. WebMCP gives agents a clean interface to your front end. It's still early, but if it lands as a standard, every website can become an agentic website.

The rankings model is dead. Prompting ChatGPT a hundred times and averaging your position to 4.7 is not measurement. Real tracking is just arriving. Bing launched AI analytics in beta last week. Google will have to follow.

Five years of this podcast and the message hasn't changed. No hacks. Just do it well. The difference is that now the cost to not doing it is higher.

Link in comments.

Every SaaS growth guide tells you to run A/B tests, offer free trials, and iterate quickly.

But what if your users are patients whose data you can't touch? Or bank customers protected by strict compliance rules?

I've watched too many regulated SaaS leaders give up on optimization entirely, believing their constraints make growth impossible. They see Canva and Spotify's success stories and think, "That could never be us."

They're half right.

Traditional product-led growth won't work when system failures mean massive fines or when your HR platform needs enterprise-wide rollout to function.

But here's what we discovered: You can validate hypotheses and optimize experiences before they ever touch your production environment.

Our research shows AI-powered heatmaps can predict user behavior with 92% accuracy, without requiring any actual user data. Lookalike user testing reveals friction points without exposing sensitive information. Rapid experimentation validates ideas before a single line of code changes.

It's off-site, experiment-led growth. Same insights, different methods.

Healthcare software. Fintech platforms. Government contractors. They're all growing within their constraints.

Your compliance requirements don't have to be growth blockers. For the full breakdown of tactics and implementation steps, check out the article below.

View newsletter: Digital Journey Insights

The traditional growth playbook falls short when compliance, privacy, and regulations limit your ability to experiment or follow product-led growth pr

Open article: Regulated SaaS Companies Need a Different Approach to Growth. What Actually Works? by Jon MacDonald • 8 min read

Regulated SaaS Companies Need a Different Approach to Growth. What Actually Works?

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

Many people feel scared when this moment comes:

Someone joins your team who is better than you.

The higher the position, the bigger the fear.

Yes, it can feel like a threat.

But think again.

Having access to smarter people is a blessing.

Which company will achieve more:

The one where the manager hires mediocre people,

or the one that hires just top stars?

Doers, believers, and hungry to learn and work.

The answer is clear.

The top people:

Bring new ideas and fresh perspectives.

Can teach you so much.

Drive companies to new heights.

Their strengths can lift the whole team.

You grow when you surround yourself with talent.

It’s an opportunity to learn and improve.

Embrace their skills.

Together, you can achieve more.

Remember, success is not a competition.

It’s about collaboration and growth.

So, don’t be afraid.
Celebrate their talent.
We’re all on the same journey.
Welcome them with open arms.
Help them thrive; one day, they will help you.

Credit: Igor Buinevici

I’ll choose remote work > higher salary.

It’s really simple.

More rest, less stress.

I’ve been remote ever since COVID but up until that point, I prioritized $.

Now, I prioritize my mental health, peace of mind, and well being. 

WFH has personally made me:

✔️ Richer
✔️ Happier
✔️ Healthier
✔️ More Productive

It’s about flexibility and choice.

Give people an OPTION to choose what works for them.

Credit: Jean Kang

Surround yourself with ambition.

It changes you.

Fast.

The line “Surround yourself with people who have bigger goals than you. Ambition is contagious” is not hype.

It is a career strategy.

Because your goals do not live in a vacuum.

They live inside your calendar.
Your standards.
Your daily conversations.
Your sense of what is normal.

And nothing shapes “normal” faster than the people around you.

When you sit near big goals long enough,

You start to borrow them.

Not by copying.
By upgrading.

Here is how influential networks quietly drive professional growth:

1. Ambition resets your baseline
 → In a low-aim room, average feels safe 
 → In a high-aim room, average feels expensive 
 → You stop asking for permission to grow

2. High performers create healthy pressure
 → Not toxic pressure 
 → Clear pressure 
 → The kind that makes you ship work, not talk about it

3. Mentors compress time
 → Mentorship is not motivation 
 → It is direction 
 → A good mentor helps you skip avoidable mistakes 
 → And raises your standards without raising your stress

4. Peers shape your pace
 → Your peers decide what “normal effort” looks like 
 → If your circle learns, you learn 
 → If your circle builds, you build 
 → If your circle settles, you settle

5. Culture multiplies behavior
 → In ambitious cultures, high expectations are not personal 
 → They are the air 
 → People plan better 
 → Communicate clearer 
 → And take ownership faster

6. Social proof does the heavy lifting
 → Humans copy what works 
 → When you watch someone set a high goal and hit it, your brain files it as possible 
 → You start to act like it is possible too 
 → Because now it feels real

7. Strategic networking opens hidden doors
 → Not “collecting contacts” 
 → Building real relationships with people who move 
 → Ambitious people share opportunities 
 → They spot talent 
 → They connect dots 
 → They pull you into rooms you did not know existed

8. Ambition spreads through language
 → Big-goal people talk in plans 
 → Not excuses 
 → They talk in timelines 
 → Not someday 
 → That language rewires how you think about your own work

9. You gain better feedback, not more praise
 → Influential networks do not clap for everything 
 → They sharpen you 
 → They challenge your thinking 
 → They raise the quality of your decisions

10. You start playing the long game
 ↳ Ambitious circles respect consistency 
 ↳ They reward craft 
 ↳ They build reputations 
 ↳ They understand that real growth compounds

This is the real point.

Your network is not just who you know.

It is what you start to believe is possible.

Choose circles that stretch you.

Because ambition is contagious.

And so is settling.


Image credit: Colby Kultgen

Ever notice who claps when you win?

And who goes quiet?

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way:

People who truly want to see you win
don’t compete with you.
They contribute to you.

They send the intro.
They share the opportunity.
They recommend your name in rooms you’re not in.

Real support isn’t loud.
It’s consistent.

And it shows up in actions, not emojis.

The right people don’t just celebrate your success.
They help build it.

Image credit: Itsletters_ on Twitter/X

Most people quit right before it works.

Because effort and reward do not move at the same speed.

Years 1 to 2:

You are bad.
You know it.
Everyone else knows it.

Good.

You are building muscle.

Year 3:

You are decent.
Still invisible.
Doubt gets louder.

This is the danger zone.
Most people exit here.

Year 4:

Your skill is real.
Your voice is clear.
Your network trusts you.

Now one catalyst matters.

A post.
A partnership.
A product launch.

And it looks sudden.

But here’s what really happened:

You compressed 4 years of learning into 30 days of output.

Example:

Builder ships 50 small tools over 4 years.
None break 1k users.

Tool #51 solves the right pain at the right time.
Hits 100k users in 2 months.

People call it overnight.

They did not see the first 50.

The playbook:

1. Treat early years as paid training.
2. Ship in public.
3. Build assets, not moments.
4. Stay until the math flips.

The lag is the price.

Pay it.

If you are in year 2 or 3, this is your sign to keep going.

Be delusional about your potential.
Be delusional about your potential.
Be delusional about your potential.
Be delusional about your potential.
Be delusional about your potential.
Be delusional about your potential.
Be delusional about your potential.

Credit: readswithravi on Twitter/X

Toxic workplaces don’t lose talent overnight.

They lose it one person at a time.

At first, the best employees try to fix things.
They speak up.
They work harder.
They try to protect the culture.

But when nothing changes, something else does:
their decision to stay.

People rarely leave because the work is hard.
They leave because the environment makes the work unbearable.

Common warning signs:
• good employees becoming quiet
• innovation slowing down
• high performers burning out
• increasing turnover of your best people

By the time leadership notices the problem, the damage is often already visible in the numbers.

Healthy workplaces do the opposite:
They keep talent by building trust, respect, and psychological safety.

Because in the long run, culture isn’t just a “soft factor.”

It’s a business strategy.

It's pointless spending time and money attracting top talent if you're not considering the work environment they're joining. 

To retain new hires, make sure your company culture is worth staying for.

Your brain is sick and tired of content.

It wants you to be creative.

Over the past 6.5 years, I've written:

- 3,559 LinkedIn posts
- 4,107 Tweets
- 789 Instagram posts
- 456 Threads
- 278 Substack notes
- 266 newsletter issues

And here's what I've learned:

1. The more you create, the happier you are:

On the days I'm sharing my creations, my mood is incredibly elevated. There's nothing better than learning something and sharing it with other people.

2. The more you consume, the more pessimistic you become:

Whenever I go down a rabbit hole on LinkedIn or X, I get bummed out. Culture wars, fighting, lack of empathy for our fellow humans. It's gross.

3. The longer you write, the better at your craft you become:

If you write every single day for a long time, you will eventually become a relatively decent writer. And there's no better way to communicate your thoughts.

4. The more you outsource creative work to AI, the dumber you become:

The more AI does your creative work, the more you forget how to be creative and original. You sound like everyone else. You blend in. You're not interesting.

TL;DR:

1. Create daily
2. Consume less
3. Write until you're good
4. Don't outsource creative


Credit : Justin Welsh

The people you admire didn’t succeed because everything worked.

They succeeded because they kept showing up after things didn’t.

We romanticize success.

We rarely talk about the boring middle:

The failed launches.
The awkward drafts.
The ideas no one clapped for.

BUT

Momentum belongs to those who don’t disappear.

Not every attempt will win.

But every attempt builds skill, confidence, and clarity.

And that compounds faster than talent.

Image credit: WisdomStoics on Twitter/X

Mission statements can inspire.
Core values can guide.
But only your daily decisions build real culture.

Eric Partaker's post on healthy company culture got me thinking about what actually builds strong teams.

I've noticed all 7 of these patterns in teams with healthy cultures:

(Credit: Amy Gibson)

1️⃣ They address toxic behavior, even from top performers

• Talent doesn't excuse toxicity when it harms the team
• One bad person can poison the entire team

2️⃣ They promote based on merit, not politics

• Wrong promotions make your best people start looking
• Performance and values should both matter

3️⃣ They don't play favorites

• Everyone sees it, even when no one says it
• Favoritism makes trust start to break down

4️⃣ They grow people-first leaders

• Technical skills matter but aren't enough alone
• Leaders who can't grow people shouldn't lead them

5️⃣ They make it safe to speak up

• When people fear feedback, problems grow
• Feeling safe to speak isn't optional

6️⃣ They give recognition regularly

• People don't leave because of the work
• They leave when they don't feel valued

7️⃣ They apply values consistently

• Not just to some people but to everyone
• No exceptions for title, time, or revenue

Culture isn't built in the big moments.

It's built in the daily decisions about who you protect, who you promote, and what you tolerate.

That's where trust lives or dies.

One thought that hit me recently:

A lot of people are afraid to spend money on experiences.

Travel.
Events.
Conferences.
Trips with friends.

But they’re not afraid of something much scarier.

Waking up years later and realizing…

the only place they ever went was work.

I’ve noticed this after talking with a lot of founders and marketers.

The things people remember aren’t the extra hours at the desk.

It’s the random trip.
The conference where they met someone interesting.
The event that sparked a new idea.

Those moments change how you think.

They expand your world.

Work matters.
Ambition matters.

But life can’t be only work.

Because time passes faster than we think.

And one day the question won’t be:

“Did I work enough?”

It’ll be:

“Did I actually live?”

Curious to hear from others:

What’s one trip, event, or experience that changed your perspective the most?

There are two types of people: those in marketing and those who give the marketing department advice.

Credit: Jay Schwedelson

What if the real skill isn’t pushing harder…
but knowing when to pause?

For years, I thought momentum meant constant motion.

Post more.
Launch faster.
Reply instantly.
Say yes.

But here’s what experience taught me the hard way:

Burnout doesn’t come from working hard.
It comes from working without reset.

The highest performers I know don’t just grind.

They rest on purpose.
They step back before they snap.
They protect clarity like it’s revenue.

Because clarity is revenue.

When you’re tired, you make emotional decisions.
When you’re scattered, you chase the wrong metrics.
When you’re overwhelmed, you mistake noise for progress.

Rest.
Reset.
Restart.
Refocus.

Not once a year.
Not when you’re forced to.

As many times as you need to.

In business, the edge often isn’t who works the most.
It’s who recalibrates the fastest.

Image credit: WisdomStoics on Twitter/X

Bad marketing:

• Here's my product
• These are the features

Good marketing:

• Here's your problem
• This is how you can solve them
• These are the benefits of using the product
• This is how it can help you
• Here is what you can achieve

Bookmark it and never forget

Credit: pmitu on Twitter/X

Life as a marketer:

Credit: Rana Bassiouni

The older I get, the less I want to be impressive.

I want to be steady.

Impressive is external.

Peace is internal.

There is a season for pushing hard.
For chasing titles.
For building reputation.

But at some point, the question changes.

Not “How do I look?”

But “How do I live?”

Here’s what shifted for me:

I stopped optimizing for optics.
I started optimizing for energy.

Because energy drives everything.

Energy affects thinking.
Thinking affects decisions.
Decisions shape life.

Example:

High status project.
Big visibility.
Constant pressure.

Versus

Focused project.
Clear scope.
Room to think.

One feeds ego.
One feeds longevity.

You can design a life that does not require constant explanation.

That is real leverage.

Impressive impresses others.

Peace compounds for you.

Choose the metric that lasts.

Image credit: 2lastvibes on Twitter/X

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