No Hacks Podcast

Host and produce the No Hacks Podcast, a weekly podcast where I interview industry experts on creating better online experiences.

Curate and connect with a diverse range of guests, including growth marketers, experimenters, and designers, to share actionable insights with our audience.

Developed a streamlined production workflow, handling all aspects of recording, editing, and distribution to ensure high-quality episodes.

Podcast Host

Web Performance Tools

Co-founded Web Performance Tools, a company dedicated to simplifying workflows for digital professionals through innovative tools tailored for modern challenges.

Leading the development of key products, including Coheseo for optimizing ad campaigns and Podpacer for enhancing podcast production efficiency.

Focus on building intuitive, user-friendly solutions that empower users to achieve better results with less effort.

Collaborate with a diverse team to continually improve and expand our product offerings, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of their users.

Co-Founder

E-commerce Growth Consultant

Maksimer AS

Growth Strategist

WordPress

WordPress core contributor for five major releases:

4.0 - https://wordpress.org/news/2014/09/benny/
4.1 - https://wordpress.org/news/2014/12/dinah/
4.2 - https://wordpress.org/news/2015/04/powell/
5.3 - https://wordpress.org/news/2019/11/kirk/
6.1 - https://wordpress.org/news/2022/11/misha/

Core Contributor

Instacart

Performance optimization - shoppers.instacart.com

Website optimization consultant

Noite Labs OÜ

CRO consultancy, on-page and technical SEO, web analytics measurement plan development and implementation.

Founder, website optimization consultant

CRO specialist, senior web analyst

Krokedil

Klarna implementation specialist, WordPress/WooCommerce developer

Alpha Brand Media

Alpha Brand Media is an independent, online media publisher that owns and operates websites in 9 diverse categories, with over 4 million monthly visitors.

Our mission is to cultivate visitors to our diverse network of media properties that range from finance to fashion to industry news and lifestyle coverage, while creating unique advertising and promotional opportunities for those who need to get in front of a qualified, targeted and loyal audience.

WordPress developer

Host @ nohacks.show podcast | Chief Growth Officer @ FOSH

I’ve spent over 15 years in the world of web development and optimization, and I still love the challenge of creating websites that are not just fast and SEO-friendly, but genuinely enjoyable for users. My work is all about finding those little tweaks that make a big difference in performance and user experience.

On the side, I host the No Hacks podcast, where I get to chat with some of the smartest people in the industry about how we can all create better online experiences. The podcast has become a space where I can share what I’ve learned, explore new ideas, and connect with others who are as passionate about tech as I am.

Whether I’m coding a site or recording an episode, I’m always curious, always learning, and always looking to improve. That’s what keeps me excited about what I do every day.

I have some HUGE news to share! I'm speaking at Conversion Hotel this November! 

To say this is an honour is a bit of an understatement. I attended for the first time last year, drawn in by the fact that my LinkedIn feed in November 2023 was ALL about Conversion Hotel for about a week. I just knew I had to be there.

I went in with high expectations, and the event blew every single one of them out of the water. The quality of the talks, the openness of the community, and all that brainpower in one location is something else.

To go from being an inspired attendee in the audience one year to being on the stage the next is a true 'pinch me' moment for me.

My session will be all about a topic I’m incredibly passionate about and that’s becoming more critical by the day: Optimising our "made for humans" websites for the new user - autonomous AI agent.

For years, we've inadvertently designed websites where human users were conditioned to tolerate a certain level of crappiness: a slightly confusing journey, a slow-loading page, an ambiguous call-to-action. We learned to muddle through because "it is what it is". 

An AI agent won't.

An AI agent has no patience for poor structure or unclear content. It doesn't care about your JS-rendered content. It won’t tolerate the weirdness and friction we’ve accepted as normal. 

Best case scenario: it gives up, worst case scenario: it does something completely unexpected.

But here's the good news, optimising for AI agents isn't about some futuristic tech wizardry. It’s about a radical return to the basics (No f*cking Hacks). It’s about getting the foundations right: clean architecture, crystal-clear messaging, structured data, and flawless paths to conversion. 

I can't wait to dive into this on the Conversion Hotel stage and share some actionable thoughts. A huge thank you to Ton and the entire Conversion Hotel team for this incredible opportunity. 

Who's going to be there? Let me know in the comments!

P.S. The current over/under for No Hacks guests in the audience is 31.5, what's your bet?

Slobodan Manić

If your website is slow or clunky, I’ll help you fix it so both humans and AI find it easier to understand and use | Host, No Hacks podcast (200+ eps)

I was a part of something cool last week and wanted to share.

After having a few conversations with Bjarn Brunenberg and Ton Wesseling in June and July we decided to try and host an event/conference/gathering here in Porto.

With only two months to invite the attendees, there were many elements where we had to get creative, so we did. Instead of having speakers and sessions, we decided to have group discussions. Instead of preparing the slides, we went analog. Instead of driving the discussion and the exercises ourselves, we invited the incredible Henrique Vedana to facilitate the event.

Instead of cooking the meals ourselves... OK, maybe not that.

And what do you get when you eliminate all the complexities and distractions? An engaged group of people discussing past, present, and Future of eXperimentation.

Did we save the world? No, in 2025 it looks like even Ethan Hunt can’t quite do it anymore. But we were able to start something new, reflect on what this industry is, discuss the critical uncertainties it faces, as well as how to prepare for them.

Stay tuned for more...

And thank you 💡Daniël Granja Baltazar, Emeline Catherine Dit Cariot, Garret Cunningham , Luiza de Lange, Nils Koppelmann, Shirley Lee, Alessandro Locatelli, Andreas Almqvist Gref, Demet Dagdelen, Jorden Lentze, Kees Mulder, Ph.D., Luis Trindade, Melanie JI Mueller, Patrik Matell, Sanne Maach Abrahamsson, Siyu Luo, Sofia Staaf and Timo Stegeman for making last week special.

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Fun fact: When you give a fox a name, and that name is Michael J. and it literally says Michael J. on the Fox it is not obvious that what you meant was Michael J. Fox. Michael Jackson? Really??? 😁

The podcast has a new home!

After experimenting with Podpage (too slow), WordPress (too much hassle for something like this) and Buzzsprout (zero flexibility) I decided to take matters into my own hands and set up a Next.js website hosted on Cloudflare for that "catch me if you can" speed and flexibility.

Check it out at https://www.nohackspod.com.

And then subscribe to be the first to get the next episode (this Wednesday), with Reddit veteran and a longtime personal friend, Brent Csutoras where we discuss why authentic community engagement is the key to success and how brands can navigate the future of marketing and discoverability in an AI-driven world.

Everyone knows Reddit matters, but very few people know what to do with it. Brent is one of those.

I walked into this interview respecting the work. I walked out respecting the person even more.

That was my experience sitting down with the legendary Bryan Eisenberg for the next episode of No Hacks. Bryan is a pioneer of conversion rate optimization and Wall Street Journal, Business Week, USA Today and New York Times best-selling author. 

His professional achievements speak for themselves.

But it was the human element that truly resonated:

- His vulnerability: Hearing him share the personal story behind his book "I Think I Swallowed an Elephant" was incredibly powerful.
- His core principle: He revealed that the common thread in his 30+ year career, from social work to advising Google, is one word: Empathy.
- His timeless wisdom: A reminder that in an age of AI, our ability to listen and connect is the ultimate advantage.

In the teaser video below, you'll get a glimpse of our full conversation.

The full conversation includes a wild story about how he recently shaped AI's understanding of his business overnight.

The full episode drops tomorrow. A huge thank you to Bryan for being such a generous guest. This is one you won't want to miss. 

And one I still can't believe I had the honour to record.

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Subscribe to the podcast (nohackspod.com) and get the episode when it drops tomorrow.

This is becoming my favourite activity each week. One day after I release a No Hacks episode I check what the LLMs know about it.

Here's how they did:

- ChatGPT and Perplexity went straight into the episode and had a lot of details, some of which were not included in show notes or anywhere else but the transcript (that I uploaded to Buzzsprout).
- Gemini was confidently incorrect. It thinks No Hacks is Bryan Eisenberg's podcast and focused more on the podcast as a whole than this specific episode. Can't blame it too much, because Bryan is a "No Hacks person" through and through, but it was still very wrong . This was the "most AI" answer by far.
- Claude was the third dragon from that meme.

In conclusion: Upload your transcripts. And don't sleep on podcasts if your goal is to be discovered by AI.

I don't know if you heard, but CRO, shopping cart, checkout page - all dead. It's all over LinkedIn.

Probably wrong, if you consider that ChatGPT is (still) a tiny acquisition channel that may or may not grow, this doesn't affect paid, social, referral or email in any way, a significantly higher than 0 percentage of these ChatGPT users will still want to go to the website to get more information, or just make sure they got the correct information from a hallucination engine, potential security issues, privacy issues, etc.

Other than that, dead.

Good news everybody, Iqbal Ali and I just finished running our very own AI Pentathlon. Instead of a single benchmark or a cherry-picked demo, we wanted to see how today’s flagship models perform across very different tasks, side by side.

We lined up five models: ChatGPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Llama 4 Maverick, and Qwen 3 Max. Each of them got the same five challenges:

- Summarize a block of text into concise bullets
- Extract structured data as valid JSON
- Write minimal but correct JavaScript unit tests
- Generate an SQL query to return the top 3 users by revenue
- Translate English into European Portuguese under strict formatting rules

Link to the document with the prompts for each challenge, as well as the system prompt is in the comments.

Everything was automated so we could track not just the answers, but also how long each model took and how many tokens it used. To be fair we ran the whole thing three times, so we could also see consistency. Then we used the best score (fastest time) for each model, because that is how they do it in the World Athletics.

The differences were striking:

- Some models sprinted through in under a second, others took more than 20 seconds for the same task.
- Token usage varied dramatically. In some cases GPT-5 used 7–10x more tokens than others.
- Consistency wasn’t guaranteed. Llama was fast and lean in every run. GPT-5 sometimes finished in 14 seconds, other times dragged past 45.

Benchmarks usually tell you about accuracy, but they often leave out two things that matter if you’re building workflows: speed and efficiency. Watching these models side by side made clear that not all “flagships” are created equal.

The attached PDF show the fastest run for each model on each task (in seconds). This is only part one. Next we’ll move to judging, where every model scores every output (including its own) for fidelity, clarity, and compliance.

That’s when we’ll find out who deserves a medal not just for speed, but for quality. Who will get a 10 from the Soviet, I mean Chinese judges?

Want to be the first to get the results? Do what the footer in the PDF says. If you go there you can also see the full video walkthrough and explanation of the competition.

P.S. I WISH I KNEW HOW TO SHOW THE EXACT VALUE FOR EACH BAR IN CANVA, but you'll figure it out.

AI Pentathlon

You’ve probably seen the viral story about a young man, raised by wolves who went on to become a best-selling, award-winning novelist.
 
Never went to school. Never learned to read or write.

Had no idea what story arcs, sentence structure, character development, pacing, foreshadowing, exposition, or narrative voice even were.

And yet, using ChatGPT in voice mode, he dictated a novel. That novel became a best-seller. It won Best Debut Novel of the Year. Critics called it “a triumph of modern literature.”

Incredible, right?

Yeah. Except it never happened. 

Vibe coding though...

With all the rumours about OpenAI announcing their "agent builder" let's slow down and see what's actually happening.

- Whatever they announce, it is VERY likely this is something you can already do today.
- AI agents' Labubu Index* is still unlikely to go above 0.3, currently at 0.09

Go hug a tree, this will be here when you come back.

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* Labubu Index - Search interest for any term compared to Labubu search interest

I love AI. Do you also love AI?

This will not take your job. Someone who thinks this can take your job will take your job, and that is even worse somehow.

For the last 20 years, we’ve been playing by a set of unwritten rules in the digital world. We chased keywords, optimized funnels, and learned to speak the language of algorithms. 

But what if that entire playbook just became obsolete?

I recently had a conversation that solidified a feeling I’ve had for months: we’re not just in a moment of transition; we're at the start of a completely new era. As AI automates the technical, the value of what is uniquely human: trust, empathy, and genuine conversation is skyrocketing.

In the latest episode of No Hacks, I explored this shift with someone who was there for the start of the last one: the brilliant Brent Csutoras.

Here are a few key reflections from our discussion:

- Trust is the ultimate metric, not the algorithm. Brent made a powerful point: algorithms follow trust. A brand can recover from a bad algorithm update, but a loss of community trust is fatal. In the new era, your reputation with people is the only ranking factor that matters.
- We are in "Year One," not Year 21. This isn't just another update. Brent argues that we are at the end of a 20-year cycle and the start of a new one. The old hacks of gaming the system are dead, and success now requires a fundamental mindset shift from chasing keywords to solving real human problems.
- Your new job is to train your AI assistant. The future of our roles isn't about mastering granular tasks that AI can now handle. It's about operating at a higher strategic level and, as Brent is already doing, preparing for the future of work by building a personal dataset of your own expertise to train your future AI agent.

This was one of those conversations that provides a new lens through which to see the future. As a Reddit thought leader who’s been navigating online communities since 2006, Brent's perspective is essential listening for anyone looking to future-proof their career.

Check out our full conversation on your favorite podcast platform (links also in the comments).

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that we're in "Year One" of a new internet?

I'm Eastern European, so all I got from this post is that there will be a No Hacks running group at Porto Half Marathon on September 13th, 2026 and you're all invited.

There's also a No Hacks group on Strava (https://lnkd.in/dfQFYEH5), I hope LinkedIn doesn't kill my reach for saying that.

Jokes aside, there are very few people I appreciate as much as Julia and I am very happy our paths crossed.

#MondayMotivation

I love people who make things happen. Those who bring ideas to life, inspire others, and constantly look for ways to improve and challenge themselves (and me 😉).

So today, I just want to take a moment to appreciate people like that and give a huge shoutout to Slobodan Manić.

We met two years ago at GMS, went for an early morning run together at Conversion Hotel last November, and had another great time hanging out at GMS this year in June.

Not only did he help me bring the GMS Podcast to life with valuable advice and thoughtful input (after all, he’s been through it all with his amazing No Hacks Podcast) but he’s also one of the most driven and creative people I know.

From launching successful new formats like a Future of Experimentation Meetup in Porto last weekend, to building digital products and still finding time to support others, he just never stops learning, creating, and sharing.

I’m truly glad our paths crossed, keep up the amazing work 💪

Here’s to everyone out there who keeps doing, building, and inspiring.
Be proud of the impact you have, you never know who you’re motivating.

P.S.: I’m still holding you to that half-marathon in Porto, autumn 2026, together with Bjarn (& Nils?)! 🏃‍♀️🇵🇹

The most important question in marketing today: Is your website built for Michael Scott, or for Robert California?

Yes, you read what you read, but let me explain.

For decades, digital marketing and optimisation have been about optimizing for our human users. Think of them as Michael Gary Scott. They're quirky, emotional, and wonderfully inconsistent. We built our strategies around their familiar patterns:

• Impatience leading to "above the fold" design. 
• Need for reassurance leading to testimonials. 
• Short attention spans leading to bite-sized content.

It was shaky at first, but then became a comfortable weirdness. We knew the playbook.

But now, a new character has entered the building. Robert California. Bob Kazamakis. The Mother******g Lizard King. The AI Agent no one really understands, no one really asked for, and everyone seems to be scared of.

He's a completely different experience. You can't read him with the old tools. He doesn't respond to the same stimuli. He's not here to make friends, he's here to extract value with maximum efficiency.

Observing AI agents is like observing Robert California (I did both). You start to see the patterns. 

He ignores your charm. Your beautiful parallax scrolling and clever animations? He doesn't see them, or at best doesn't care for them. He preys on ambiguity. If you aren't direct and clear, he will create his own bizarre narrative. 

AI agents demand the same from you. They need to know exactly who is speaking, what their credibility is, and what the content is definitively about.

You can't use the old Michael Scott tactics on Robert California. You have to sit back, observe, and give him exactly what he came for or he'll go somewhere else.

It's a shift from persuading a person to feeding a system and I don't think the world is ready.

Something potentially huge was announced yesterday. Shopify has partnered with OpenAI to "bring commerce directly into ChatGPT" (quoting Shopify president Harley Finkelstein).

If you follow me, you know that one of my favourite things to do with ChatGPT is to pass their own announcements through ChatGPT, to ask it to find all the marketing bullshit they sprinkle in. Often it's nothing but sprinkles, but this one feels like it could be real.

At the very least, it is a real threat to status quo. For decades, ever since Dan Kohn sold that Sting CD for $12.48 in 1994, we have been optimizing the user interface layer to nudge the user into converting, and then converting again. 

It was about value proposition, relevance, clarity, urgency, anxiety and distraction (LIFT model rocks, thank you Chris Goward).

This integration does not mean "CRO is dead" ("is dead" crowd has a special place in clickbait hell), but it really could mean it's about to become different. Not the optimizing for humans browsing the website part, I don't see that changing dramatically, but there's a new user now, with a new black boxed abstraction layer between what your website tells them and shows them and their decision to buy.

And let's be clear: this is still ONE channel out of many. Think of it as another version of organic because it kind of is. But this technology where a hallucinating-by-design LLM makes decision for your users (seriously, wtf?) is here and companies are burning billions, tres comas and all, to get it into everything. I hope they don't succeed, but I've also been hoping Knicks would make the finals since 1999.

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