Co-Founder & M.D @ Louder.Online

As a businessman,  entrepreneur, and author, I've spent 16 years reshaping the landscape of our industry. 

Co-founding Louder.Online 16 years ago was the beginning of a journey that has led to global recognition, transformative partnerships, and multiple successful ventures.

Some of my journey's highlights include:

→ Co-authored the book "Faster, Smarter, Louder"
→ Consulted for Fortune 100 clients including Salesforce, Intel, IBM, Coca-Cola, and Target
→ Authored over 1,000 articles for major publications like Forbes, HubSpot, and Entrepreneur
→ Recognized as a thought leader by Content Marketing Institute and Search Engine Journal
→ Delivered speeches across the US, UK, Asia, and Australia

As a serial entrepreneur, I've:

→ Co-founded Louder.Online, recognized among the top 25 Martech Companies in Asia-Pacific
→ Started multiple businesses across various industries
→ Launched an M&A education business focused on small business acquisitions
→ Developed expertise in multi-channel marketing, SEO, PPC, CRO, and content marketing

My work has garnered attention from prestigious media outlets:

→ Featured in The Huffington Post, Forbes, and the Sydney Morning Herald
→ Regular contributor to HubSpot, Entrepreneur, and Fortune
→ Guest on popular podcasts like Mixergy and Entrepreneur on Fire

My approach goes beyond traditional marketing. I create actionable, thoughtful strategies that not only deliver new customers but build lasting brand relationships. 

If you're looking to revolutionize your digital presence, explore business acquisition opportunities, or drive your brand into the future, let's connect.

Aaron Agius

I’ve watched outdated SEO strategies die in real time.

The digital graveyard is full of businesses that thought lazy, generic SEO could win.

90% of “professionals” are still playing that losing game.

Do you honestly think you’re different?

Most still build SEO on wishful thinking:
➔ Pick random keywords
➔ Stuff them into useless content
➔ Chase backlinks like desperate attention-seekers

That’s exactly how Strategy B self-destructed.

Here’s how you actually dominate SEO today, and what Strategy A did:

Content & Intent
➔ Educational content solving real market pain points
➔ Surgical alignment with sector-specific search intent

Optimization & Testing
➔ Real-time, data-driven adaptation—not set-and-forget
➔ Technical excellence: site speed, mobile-first, UX
➔ A/B testing like a sniper, not spray-and-pray

Metrics & Authority
➔ Focus on real metrics: traffic, conversions, revenue
➔ Targeted, high-authority links earned intelligently

I use nothing except what delivers measurable, aggressive results.

Strategy A didn’t just beat Strategy B—it obliterated it: 4.2x more traffic, more revenue, more engagement.

Why? It was engineered to annihilate inferiority.

Without precision, relevance, and data, you’re irrelevant.

Your competitors who do invest in these will outpace, out-earn, and erase you.

Strong CTAs help—but strong brands are better.

Make people WANT to buy from you.

Don’t force them.

If your SEO is still on autopilot, you’re not just falling behind—you’re already buried.

The fastest way to kill an agency isn’t bad SEO; it’s hiring people who ‘know SEO.’

Join the top 1% of agency leaders by facing this truth:
Your obsession with “SEO experience” is suffocating your future.

Most agencies cling to experience like a life raft.

They treat it as gospel.

A shortcut to credibility.

But experience has quietly become a straitjacket.

The harder you demand it, the more you guarantee stagnation.

Ask yourself who’s really moving your agency forward: rule-followers, or rule-breakers?

I’ve watched agencies collapse under the weight of “proven” tactics and “seasoned” hires.

Creativity didn’t die.

It was choked out by predictable resumes and recycled solutions.

SEO innovation has never come from playing by the book.

Yet agencies keep hiring carbon copies of their competitors.

That isn’t strategy—it’s delusion.

Here’s the reality:

Experience doesn’t guarantee relevance.

It creates echo chambers.

It filters out the renegades: the ones bold enough to ask, “Why are we still doing this?”

SEO today doesn’t reward mastery of 2012 tactics.

It rewards people who see new patterns and act before consensus forms.

The agencies leading this industry aren’t run by veterans clutching dusty playbooks.

They’re driven by talent with audacity, curiosity, and vision.

This isn’t an argument for ignorance.

Technical skill matters, but only as a foundation.

Without creativity layered on top, it’s useless.

Hire safe, and you’ll rank safe.

And safe is invisible.

Keep demanding “SEO experience required,” and you’ll keep getting substandard work. 

Interchangeable campaigns. Predictable outcomes. Slow decline.

If you want to win, hire people who challenge you.

Who ask better questions instead of reciting old answers.

Break your addiction to experience as a proxy for value, or accept average results.

Because the future belongs to agencies willing to reject the default.

Your move.

Why 'SEO Experience Required' Is Killing Agency Innovation

You think office perks keep talent loyal?

Try locking a strong engineer into an outdated tech stack, then watch how fast the kombucha bar stops mattering.

The modern workplace does not lose top performers because snacks are poorly picked.

It loses them because leaders micromanage tools instead of trusting professionals.

Read that again.

How most teams think retention works:
➔ Free lunches and unlimited coffee
➔ Nap pods and ping-pong tables
➔ Trendy offices with beanbags

How retention actually works:
➔ Real autonomy to choose, test, and deploy the right technology
➔ Zero tolerance for legacy systems that choke creativity
➔ Trust in the people closest to the work to define what drives results

Ask your best developer what matters more: her keyboard or the pizza in the breakroom.

If she’s any good, she’ll dismiss the perks and ask for freedom to use the right tools.

Here’s what tech stack autonomy delivers:
➔ Teams focused on outcomes, not optics
➔ Faster cycles without friction from outdated software
➔ A culture that attracts serious talent
➔ Skill growth that compounds through real problem-solving

You don’t see elite companies leading with office perks.

You see them winning because they invest in adaptable tech and let experts decide what works.

Retention is not about dopamine hits from free stuff.

It’s about respecting intelligence.

Perks often mask deeper dysfunction.

Rigid tools signal control, not stability.

Top performers want environments where they can break, rebuild, and improve their own stack.

Anything less tells them they will be more valuable somewhere else.

If perks are still your retention strategy, competitors are already recruiting your team.

Strong CTAs matter.

But strong brands matter more.

Make people want to work for you.

Don’t try to trap them.

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Why Tech Stack Freedom Matters More Than Office Perks

I stopped solely chasing Google rankings years ago and scaled my businesses to seven figures while competitors stayed stuck on the keyword hamster wheel.

Most people still treat traditional SEO like a lifeline.

That’s why growth feels slow, visibility is inconsistent, and progress looks like motion without momentum.

The playbook is outdated, even if it’s familiar.

My domination strategy:
➔ Eliminate dependency on Google
➔ Distribute hyper-targeted content across syndication, affiliates, and dark social
➔ Automate omnipresence so my audience can’t avoid the message

Too aggressive? That’s usually what unqualified marketers say before irrelevance catches up.

Week to week, I’m outpacing competitors by:
➔ Building distribution networks that bypass search entirely
➔ Partnering with affiliates who reach audiences Google never will
➔ Seeding dark social with conversion-first assets that collapse the discovery cycle

Alongside that:
➔ I run automation pipelines that deploy content before rivals even react
➔ I choose syndication channels where brand control is absolute
➔ I use precision micro-distribution that bloated SaaS tools can’t replicate

What worked?

Killing SEO dependency.

No waiting. No link begging. No algorithm worship.

I move faster and command attention while others tweak metadata.

What doesn’t work?

Playing it safe: incremental keyword gains, endless dashboard watching, and hoping rankings turn into momentum.

Anyone still glued to Search Console is ignoring how fast this market moves.

This works because control beats compliance.

I refuse to let an algorithm designed to flatten ambition dictate my growth.

I build distribution that’s automated, precise, and relentless, so omnipresence is engineered, not earned.

Comfort kills scale.

If you want real growth, stop digging through SEO fossils and start building systems that can’t be throttled.

The future belongs to those who own distribution, not those waiting to be ranked.

Most digital marketing teams celebrated today are bloated relics, propped up by outdated thinking.

Everyone wants elite performance, yet almost no one wants to accept what it actually requires.

What I see with top enterprise clients is a very different model.

It is not stacked talent or big personalities.

It is precision, alignment, and results. Nothing else.

Here is where most digital teams fail.

They worship vanity metrics.

They stay busy with meetings, reports, and headcount growth that leads to stagnation.

Their structures mirror yesterday’s failures, not tomorrow’s wins.

They talk about analytics while guessing which levers matter.

Now compare that to what actually works.

I align marketing with sales, product, and customer success so no message conflicts.

Analytics should be foundational, not decorative. Data drives every assignment.

In addition:
➔ Every hire is intentional: there are no “nice-to-have” roles
➔ Roles are built for one clear outcome, not inflated resumes
➔ If a tool or automation does not drive progress, it is not purchased

What worked for me was relentless prioritization.

Teams must be built for impact, not appearance.

Trendy tools without measurable lift are wasted spend.

What never worked was growing teams for ego.

Chasing trends.

Separating marketing from sales and product.

If a team is not aligned around one strategy, one dataset, and one goal, it will fail.

Enterprise environments remove illusions fast.

Discipline and data decide everything. Everything else is noise.

The future belongs to leaders who build marketing teams as strategic weapons, not social clubs.

If you are still running a team built for 2016, the outcome is predictable.

You either define the next decade, or you get outperformed by it.

Watching enterprise websites bleed millions is like seeing a luxury yacht sink while the crew argues over who forgot to plug a hole.

Everyone gawks at digital “giants,” yet few have the guts to fix the mistakes draining revenue.

Right now, 83% of enterprise sites sabotage themselves—ignoring SEO audits and gifting revenue to competitors.

Tomorrow, those who embrace relentless auditing and optimization dominate.

Here’s how I approach it weekly:
➔ Full audits with Screaming Frog & Sitebulb—anything less is amateur hour
➔ Fix broken links, slow pages, outdated metadata before they drain revenue
➔ Mobile optimization checks—59% of search is mobile; ignoring it is malpractice

Beyond that:
➔ Page speed benchmarking—every second costs ~7% conversions
➔ Crawl & indexation analysis with GSC & Ahrefs
➔ Site architecture reviews—duplicate content, buried conversion paths, hidden opportunities

What works? Relentless, unsentimental audits.

What doesn’t? Overpaid agencies or “set-and-forget” in-house teams.

Complacency costs millions.

Why it works for me? Every missed audit is a personal attack on profit.

Numbers dip? I hold the process accountable, not Google.

The data doesn’t lie: 1 second of delay = 7% fewer conversions.

Mobile traffic dominates—fail there, and competitors feast.

No enterprise wins by accident.

The choice is clear:
➔ Audit, optimize, cash in
➔ Or watch market share vanish

Neglect is a choice.

Optimization is a weapon.

Budget won’t save broken processes.

Face the numbers. Confront reality. Do the work.

Your revenue depends on it.

Mistakes Enterprise Websites Should Watch Out For

Your “thought leadership” content isn’t building authority, it’s training your audience to scroll past.

I’ve seen too many enterprise marketing execs cling to their blogs like security blankets, while the audience moves on.

Your blog isn’t building authority.

It’s shouting into a void while people scroll, swipe, and click past.

Long articles, keyword stuffing, “thought leadership”: they’re mostly ignored.

Drop the delusion.

How most teams think engagement works in 2026:
➔ Four blog posts a week for “consistency”
➔ Endless SEO tweaks chasing shrinking search traffic
➔ Bloated articles that vanish after publishing

How engagement actually works:
➔ Data-driven, personalized content based on real audience signals
➔ Interactive video, audio, and immersive formats that stop scrolling
➔ Strategic distribution on channels people actually use

Reality check: over 50% of marketers report declining blog traffic.

Average attention? Less than 60 seconds.

Only 26% see ROI.

Meanwhile, audience-first content drives engagement and conversions up 200%+.

Blogging is the fax machine of marketing: familiar, expensive, ignored.

Every hour spent polishing posts is an hour not building experiences that actually connect.

Stop obsessing over calendars.

Start listening to data.

Build experiences, not posts.

Blogging was a tool.

Adaptive, audience-first content is your advantage.

If your strategy still revolves around publishing more words, you’ve already chosen mediocrity, while competitors build real relationships.

Why We Tell Our Clients to STOP Creating Blog Posts

Every SEO team has a budget and an outcome.

Here’s the truth: only one of these is truly yours.

Competitors can throw money at bloated agencies.

Fill seats with ineffective generalists.

Buy overpriced tools.

Boast about “full-service.”

But they can’t build surgical efficiency.

☑ Budgets Limit
Budgets come from profit constraints, not strategy or boldness.

☑ Outcomes Build Trust
Clients trust teams that deliver traffic, rankings, and revenue—on time, every time.

☑ Outcomes Differentiate
In a world of “big spend, minimal results,” outcomes set you apart.

Why outcomes matter more than budget:
➔ Showcase expertise
➔ Prove real impact
➔ Build credibility
➔ Attract results-focused clients
➔ Create loyalty through performance
➔ Fuel word-of-mouth with execution

Here’s how I focus on outcomes:

Team & Roles
➔ Hire a single full-time SEO lead for clarity, strategy, and cross-team alignment
➔ Use freelancers with deep expertise for high-impact work
➔ Demand role clarity—everyone owns a piece of the result

Tools & Processes
➔ Exploit only tools that matter: Ahrefs Lite, SEMrush Pro, GSC
➔ Cut “nice-to-have” software and vanity spends
➔ Enable cross-functional collaboration with devs, UX, content, and analytics

Learning & Measurement
➔ Rapidly upskill your team with free resources: Google SEO Starter Guide, Moz Academy
➔ Measure every KPI ruthlessly: rankings, organic sessions, revenue per page
➔ Reject the mindset that “budget = success”—brains, discipline, and adaptability drive results

Focusing on outcomes isn’t a tactic.

It’s the bedrock of a performance culture.

Lead with outcomes.

And watch market domination follow.

Building an SEO Team Without a Big Agency Budget

Stop fantasizing that clever slogans or bloated teams will propel you forward. Study the enterprises that win, then reengineer your marketing machinery with laser focus on efficiency and strategic thermonuclear power. Or, stick to your old ways and watch those quarterly reports slide deeper into shameful territory.

There is no magic formula, no shortcut, no fairy tale “hack” to building a world-class SEO team on a budget. There is only strategy, discipline, and the will to act while your competitors waste time and money.

It’s time for some honesty. You do not need a monstrous marketing budget or the razzle-dazzle of agency smoke and mirrors to build an SEO team that cr

Open article: Building an Elite SEO Team on a Budget: The Unforgiving Truth No Agency Will Tell You by Aaron Agius • 6 min read

Building an Elite SEO Team on a Budget: The Unforgiving Truth No Agency Will Tell You

If you want an agency that shapes tomorrow, recruit like your future depends on it—because it does.

Every time you hide behind “SEO experience required,” you’re lighting the funeral pyre for your own ambition. There will be no applause at the grave.

The Ruthless Truth About Innovation, Recruitment, and Survival in Modern Digital Marketing Let’s incinerate the industry’s most sacred cow right up fr

Open article: Is Your Obsession with “SEO Experience” Suffocating Your Agency’s Future? by Aaron Agius • 8 min read

Is Your Obsession with “SEO Experience” Suffocating Your Agency’s Future?

The benchmark for success is no longer innovation. It’s about acquiring, hacking, and out-optimizing every single move your competition makes—and then automating it so aggressively that human error and hesitation are eliminated.

Let me ask a question that will probably make you squirm: Just how naked are you, competitively speaking? I’m not talking about the LinkedIn vanity me

Open article: How Reverse Engineering Competitor Strategies Fuels Industry Leadership by Aaron Agius • 7 min read

How Reverse Engineering Competitor Strategies Fuels Industry Leadership

Empower your workforce to choose, adapt, and evolve their own tools, and you’ll lock in the best talent, outpace your industry, and shatter old benchmarks for innovation and growth. Stick to the myth of perks, and you'll wake up to a talent exodus and a stalled product roadmap.

Abandon everything you know about SEO. Engineer an underground content distribution system that guarantees visibility, authority, and conversion at scale. Traditionalists will be crushed. Only the relentless—the ones who dare to discard the outdated—will dominate.

Accept the harshest reality in digital marketing: traditional SEO is finished. Yes, you read that correctly. The endless grind of optimizing keywords,

Open article: From Zero to $1M: The Ruthless Content Distribution Blueprint That Annihilates Outdated SEO by Aaron Agius • 9 min read

From Zero to $1M: The Ruthless Content Distribution Blueprint That Annihilates Outdated SEO

It’s not too late to fix this. Shred your editorial calendar and interrogate your data. Ask your customers what they want—every quarter, every campaign, every channel. If your answer is “more blog posts,” you’re asking the wrong people, or you’re lying to yourself.

If you’re in the 83% still treating audits as an afterthought, just know this—the clock is counting down on your market share, your profitability, and, possibly, your job.

If you want to shift from bleeding revenue to dominating your sector, the path is simple and merciless: Audit. Fix. Audit again. Only the relentless survive. Only the disciplined thrive.

The $100 Million Blunder Sabotaging 83% of Big Brands Let’s destroy the myth right now: Enterprise organizations are not immune to catastrophic digita

Open article: Are Critical SEO Issues Costing Enterprise Websites Millions? by Aaron Agius • 9 min read

Are Critical SEO Issues Costing Enterprise Websites Millions?

If you still believe original ideas win markets, you’ve already lost.

The real power belongs to those ruthless enough to rip apart competitor strategies, reconstruct them with brutal efficiency, and then weaponize automation to dominate at scale.

The CEOs clinging to “innovation first” are simply donating market share to the cunning operators who treat competitor intelligence as the only path to victory.

Are you building your business on naive optimism or unforgiving reality?

Who wins the future: original “innovators,” or tacticians who dissect, replicate, and automate competitors until nothing is left to steal?

You can chase the ghost of “adequate SEO,” comfort yourself with pointless dashboards, and watch your competitors suffocate you in the SERPs.

Or you can build a program so empirically sound, so viciously focused, that 4.2x isn’t your ceiling—it’s your starting point. It’s not about working harder. It’s about being too precise, too ruthless, and too relentless for anyone else to keep up.

You want proof that most so-called “SEO experts” are nothing but glorified guessers? Keep reading. If you’re clinging to tired, generic strategies, yo

Open article: Why One SEO Strategy Outperformed Another by 4.2x (And Why Most Experts Never Will) by Aaron Agius • 8 min read

Why One SEO Strategy Outperformed Another by 4.2x (And Why Most Experts Never Will)

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?

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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);}Aaron Agius's LinkedIn Performance

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